Geospatial Data and Analysis

Chapter 1. An Overview of Geospatial Analytics

Geospatial data—that is, data with location information—is generated in huge volumes by billions of mobile phones, sensors, and other sources every day. Data begets data, constantly ratcheting up the unbounded streams of geospatial data (“geodata” for short) awaiting our analysis. Where people and their machines go, what our remote sensing detects, and how our devices are arrayed in space and perform across time all matter a great deal to the vibrancy of our economy, the health of our planet, and our general happiness and well-being. Geospatial analytics can provide us with the tools and methods we need to make sense of all that data and put it to use in solving problems we face at all scales.

Geospatial Analytics: Origins and Evolving Use Cases

Geospatial analytics has its contextual roots in print cartography and its contemporary development in defense. In the United States, the Department of Defense (DoD) has traditionally been the biggest consumer of geospatial analytics. Intelligence community satellites have been producing constant streams of telemetry for decades now, and defense vehicles, sensor nets, and many other sources of data have sprung up over time. With the rise of this type of data, the DoD has helped promote open source, open data, and data analysis companies such as Socrata, Databricks, and Uncharted Software. Much could be written (and indeed has) on the history of geographic information systems (GISs) and geospatial ...