Embed2Scale Advances Earth Observation at the 2nd Geo-Embeddings Sprint in Zürich

On October 27 and 28, the 2nd Earth Embedding Sprint took place in Zürich, Switzerland, bringing together a vibrant mix of industry leaders, academic institutions, and non-profits across the public and private sectors. As an active voice in the Earth embeddings and foundation models space, Embed2Scale was right at the heart of the action. Following an inspiring round of updates on recent innovations since the first sprint (held in March 2026 in Worcester, MA, USA), the community pitched key topics and jumped straight into collaborative work.

Embed2Scale partners made significant strides during the sessions. Jonas Hurst from the University of Münster worked on a SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) extension specification to catalog pre-computed Earth embeddings alongside their metadata, ensuring community-published tools and embeddings remain seamlessly interoperable—a specification that can be explored here. 

Meanwhile, Rikard Vinge from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) focused on building trust in embedding products by developing guidelines for transparency around input data and model uncertainties. Because scaling Earth embeddings relies entirely on data credibility, these guidelines directly strengthen the trustworthiness of all Embed2Scale use cases. Once the results from the sprint are fully refined, they will be published on geoembeddings.org, the official community website.

Reflecting on how niche Earth Foundation Models and embeddings were when Embed2Scale launched three years ago, the consortium is proud to have helped shape this thriving, essential field. Special thanks goes out to the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum for organizing the sprint and to IBM Research Zürich for generously hosting the event on their premises.