Making the Most of Geo Data

Inmarsat Developer Conference 2016

james@geovation.uk

@JamesLMilner

loxodrome.io

James Milner

What is geographic data?

That bar behind the coffee shop on Westferry Road?

An address?

A postcode?

A latitude and longitude?

Easting and Northing?

x and y?

Coordinate Systems

Textual data may be useful in context, but it is not directly plottable on a map

How do we model geographical data?

Points: a house, a shop, a postbox, etc

Lines : Roads, Rivers, Paths etc

Polygons: fields, parks, lakes etc

Raster to Vector

Storing and Retrieving Data

Flat Files

Shapefile

Tabfile

CSV

KML

GML

etc

Databases also play a key role

 SELECT ST_Area(the_geog)/POWER(0.3048,2) 
        As sqft, ST_Area(the_geog) As sqm FROM somegeogtable;

Spatial Querying

What about serving out data?

OGC Standard Services

Also increasingly we serve and query this data via de facto APIs

Andreesen Horowitz (2014)

Alongside this ~30% of the world will be able to produce & consume geospatial data

Pew Research (2012)

That's ignoring machine produced data

Cell phone networks can produce ~100'000 geo events per second

To put that into perspective, there are around ~6000 Tweets per second globally

Source: Open Signal 2015

OK, so you've got all this data, now what?

Processing

Actually processing data to a useful state can take up a lot of time

Mobile and Web Viewing

What are your mapping framework options?

Hello Map

// ArcGIS JavaScript API
require(["esri/map", "dojo/domReady!"], function(Map) {
  var map = new Map("map", {
    center: [-118, 34.5],
    zoom: 8,
    basemap: "topo"
  });
});

// Google Maps JavaScript API
var map;
function initMap() {
    map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById('map'), {
      center: {lat: -34.397, lng: 150.644},
      zoom: 8
    });
}

// Leaflet JS
var map = L.map('map').setView([51.505, -0.09], 13);
var attr = '© <a href="http://osm.org/copyright">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors';

L.tileLayer('http://{s}.tile.osm.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {
    attribution: attr
}).addTo(map);