An abandoned geospatial chatbot that talked to satellites

What it does

Chat2Geo is a read-only legacy snapshot of a web app that wrapped Google Earth Engine and other geospatial tools behind a conversational interface. Users could upload vector data, run land-cover mapping, detect land-use changes, and perform urban heat island analysis by typing requests in natural language. The stack glued together Next.js, MapLibre GL, LangChain, and the Vercel AI SDK to stream OpenAI responses while crunching satellite data on Google Cloud and Google Earth Engine. It also experimented with early RAG features and Supabase-backed authentication, though the README stresses the whole thing was experimental and never production-ready.

The interesting bit

The unusual angle is bridging LLM natural-language parsing with heavy remote-sensing pipelines running on Google Earth Engine, turning satellite imagery analysis into a chat thread. It is also refreshingly honest: GeoRetina explicitly labels this as a legacy snapshot, warns that setup instructions may be broken, and forbids using the Chat2Geo name on forks now that the product is commercial.

Key highlights

• Natural-language queries for remote-sensing tasks like land-cover mapping, change detection, and urban-heat-island analysis
• Google Earth Engine integration for satellite data processing
• Vector data upload and analysis
• Early experiments with RAG and document-based knowledge features
• Explicitly archived; GeoRetina no longer maintains the open-source snapshot and operates a separate commercial product

Caveats

• The repository is archived, read-only, and no longer maintained
• Setup instructions may be outdated, and required cloud credentials or third-party service terms may have changed
• The README warns that the code was experimental and not production-ready, and may contain known or unknown bugs

Verdict

Curious developers and researchers studying early LLM-geospatial integration might find the architecture instructive, but anyone needing a maintained, production-ready open-source GIS chatbot should look elsewhere—GeoRetina now sells the current product and explicitly provides no support for this legacy code.