OCaml and point clouds

I made some small progress towards my dream of a global point cloud viewer this week. Not much progress, but a start. It was riffing off a conversation I had with Anil Madhavapeddy a couple of weeks ago, where we talked about how we could have a single index for all the geospatial data we wanted. Whilst I started with trying to load all of OSM into PostGIS, I then stalled as I realised I didn't really 1) have a motivating example, and 2) didn't understand how spacial indexes work. So with apologies to Anil, I set out of a side-quest from this, but one I hope will make it easier for me to frame that original task when I return to it. An ever expanding viewer The motivating example I'm going to start with is my Lidar viewer which you can play with here. This started out as just showing a tiny area of Lidar data to being something where now I can pull in many different types of aligned data to let me explore and compare datasets. You can read more about this here, but the tl;dr is that…