Wherobots Joins Overture, Winning The Taco Wars, Spatial SQL API, Geospatial Index Podcast – This Month In Wherobots

Welcome to This Month In Wherobots the monthly developer newsletter for the Wherobots & Apache Sedona community! This month we have news about Wherobots and the Overture Maps Foundation, a deep dive on new Wherobots Cloud features like raster inference, generating vector tiles, and the Spatial SQL API, plus a look at retail cannibalization analysis for the commercial real estate industry.

Wherobots Joins Overture Maps Foundation

Wherobots has officially joined Overture Maps Foundation to support the next generation of planetary-scale open map data. Wherobots has supported the development of Overture datasets through Overture Maps Foundation’s use of the open-source Apache Sedona project to develop and distribute global data, enabling Overture to embrace modern cloud-native geospatial technologies like GeoParquet. By joining Overture as Contributing Members Wherobots will continue to support the ongoing development, distribution, and evolution of this critical open dataset that enables developers and data practitioners to make sense of the world around us.

Read the announcement blog post

Featured Community Members: Sean Knight & Ilya Marchenko

This month’s featured community members is Ilya Marchenko from YuzuData where he focuses on AI and location intelligence for the commercial real estate industry. Ilya recently wrote a blog post showing how to use Wherobots for a retail cannibalization study. Thanks Sean and Ilya for being a part of the community and sharing how you’re building geospatial products using Wherobots!

Comparing Taco Chains: A Consumer Retail Cannibalization Study With Isochrones

Understanding the impact of opening a new retail location on existing locations is an important analysis in the commercial real estate industry. In this code-heavy blog post the YuzuData team detail a retail cannibalization analysis using WherobotsDB, Overture Maps point of interest data, drive-time isochrones using the Valhalla API, and visualization with SedonaKepler. Sean also presented this analysis earlier this week in a live webinar.

Read the blog post or watch the video recording

Unlock Satellite Imagery Insights With WherobotsAI Raster Inference

One of the most exciting features in Wherobots’ latest release is WherobotsAI Raster Inference which enables running machine learning models on satellite imagery for object detection, segmentation, and classification. This post gives a detailed look at the types of models supported by WherobotsAI and an overview of the SQL and Python APIs for raster inference with an example of identifying solar farms for the purpose of mapping electricity infrastructure.

Read the blog post to learn more about WherobotsAI Raster Inference

Generating Global PMTiles In 26 Minutes With WherobotsDB VTiles

WherobotsDB VTiles is a highly scalable vector tile generator capable of generating vector tiles from small to planetary scale datasets quickly and cost-efficiently and supports the PMTiles format. In this post we see how to generate vector tiles of the entire planet using three Overture layers. Using Wherobots Cloud to generate PMTiles of the Overture buildings layer takes 26 minutes. The post includes all code necessary to recreate these tile generation operations and a discussion of performance considerations.

Read the blog post to learn more about WherobotsDB VTiles

Spatial SQL API Brings Performance Of WherobotsDB To Your Favorite Data Applications

The Wherobots Spatial SQL API enables integration with Wherobots Cloud via Python and Java client drivers. In addition to enabling integrations with your favorite data applications via the client drivers, Wherobots has released an Apache Airflow provider for orchestrating data pipelines and an integration with Harlequin, a popular SQL IDE.

Read the blog post to learn more about the Wherobots Spatial SQL API

Wherobots On The Geospatial Index Podcast

William Lyon from Wherobots was recently a guest on The Geospatial Index podcast. In this episode he discusses the origins of Apache Sedona, the open-source technology behind Wherobots, how users are building spatial data products at massive scale with Wherobots, how Wherobots is improving the developer experience around geospatial analytics, and much more.

Watch the video recording

Upcoming Events

• Apache Sedona Community Office Hours (Online – August 6th) – Join the Apache Sedona community for updates on the state of Apache Sedona, presentation and demo of recent features, and provide your input into the roadmap, future plans, and contribution opportunities.
• GeoMeetup: Cloud Native Spatial Data Stack (San Francisco – September 5th) – Join us on September 5th for an exciting GeoMeetup featuring talks from industry leaders with Wherobots and Felt.com. In this meetup we will be exploring the elements of the cloud native spatial data stack.
• FOSS4G NA 2024 (St Louis – September 9th-11th) – FOSS4G North America is the premier open geospatial technology and business conference. Join the Wherobots team for a pre-conference workshop or come by and chat with us at the Wherobots booth to learn about the latest developments in Apache Sedona.

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