In the latest edition of This Month In Wherobots the latest highlights from the Wherobots & Apache Sedona community include an overview of the Havasu spatial table format, a look back at Wherobots’ 2023 in review, analyzing Overture Maps and real estate data, finding the perfect Christmas tree, plus big data analytics for sustainable smart cities.

Havasu: A Table Format for Spatial Attributes In A Data Lake Architecture

The Havasu spatial table format is an extension of Apache Iceberg that brings native spatial support to data lakes. This post introduces Havasu and some of its key features and technical insights such as support for primitive spatial data types and storage, spatial statistics, and spatial filter push down and indexing. Examples of creating and querying Havasu tables as well as how Havasu working with GeoParquet is also covered. If you’ve used the Wherobots open data catalog you may have already leveraged Havasu!

Read More About The Havasu Spatial Table Format

Featured Community Member: Muhammed O?uzhan METE

Our featured community member this month is Dr. Muhammed O?uzhan METE. Muhammed is an Assistant Professor at Istanbul Technical University in the Geomatics Engineering Department. His research areas of focus are land management, real estate management, GIS, machine learning, and big data analytics. He is also an AWS Community Builder. Muhammed presented "Geospatial Big Data Analytics For Sustainable Smart Cities" at the FOSS4G 2023 conference where he shared how Apache Sedona can be used for large scale spatial analytics.

Connect with Muhammed On LinkedIn

Geospatial Big Data Analytics For Sustainable Smart Cities

In this presentation from FOSS4G 2023 Dr. Muhammed Oguzhan Mete covers the need for large-scale geospatial data analysis for sustainable smart city project development. He covers some of the use cases for large scale data analysis relevant for smart cities such as how to make smart infrastructure decisions to meet goals for sustainability. He discusses how to work with geospatial big data in cloud computing environments for the purposes of analyzing energy performance of buildings at scale and how spatial joins and spatial clustering algorithms can be implemented using Apache Sedona and Dask GeoPandas to identify clusters of lower energy efficiency scores to inform policy decision making. Finally, he shows a benchmark comparing the performance of Apache Sedona and Dask GeoPandas for spatial joins and spatial clustering. You’ll have to watch the video to see the final results!

Watch the recording of "Geospatial Big Data Analytics For Sustainable Smart Cities"

Wherobots: 2023 Year In Review

2023 has been an exciting year for Wherobots and this post points out a handful of key moments for Wherobots and the Apache Sedona community. Highlights of the year included 130% growth of Apache Sedona usage, key hires for growing the Wherobots team, launching Wherobots Cloud and SedonaDB, and raising a $5.5M seed funding round.

Read More About Wherobots: 2023 Year In Review

Analyzing The Overture Maps Places Dataset

In this article from Pranav Toggi we learn how to query and analyze the Overture Maps Places dataset using SedonaDB and Wherobots Cloud. After a review of the data schema we see how to filter for points of interest within New York City and explore businesses within walking distance of stadiums and event venues. Along the way we learn several ways to visualize the data and results of our analysis.

Read "Analyzing The Overture Maps Places Dataset Using SedonaDB, Wherobots Cloud, & GeoParquet

Finding The Perfect Christmas Tree With USFS Map Data, QGIS, & SedonaDB

This tutorial walks through how to use US Forest Service road data and aerial imagery to find the perfect Christmas tree. It covers loading and querying USFS road data, annotating aerial imagery in QGIS, then combining them and querying using SQL to find routes in National Forests to the perfect tree stands.

Read "Finding The Perfect Christmas Tree With USFS Map Data, QGIS, & SedonaDB"

Analyzing Real Estate Data With SedonaDB

In a livestream tutorial on the Wherobots YouTube channel we worked through how to use data from Zillow to analyze real estate values in the US. We calculated the change in real estate values at the county level over the last 5 years and created choropleth maps to help visualize the results. We also wrote up a written tutorial so you can follow along in Wherobots Cloud.

Watch Analyzing Real Estate Data With SedonaDB

Upcoming Events

• GeoBuiz Summit (Monteray California – January 9-11, 2024) – Wherobots CEO Mo Sarwat will be presenting at the GeoBuiz Summit in a plenary panel addressing the "Geospatial Value Chain for Retail and Commerce". If you’re at the conference stop by and say hi!
• GeoParquet Community Day (San Francisco – January 30th, 2024) – Join us for GeoParquet Community Day to highlight the usage of spatial data in Parquet, open table formats, and cloud-native spatial analytics.
• Data Day Texas (Austin, TX – January 27, 2024) – Will from Wherobots will be presenting a talk on geospatial analytics with Apache Sedona and Spatial SQL
• Hands On With Havasu and GeoParquet (Online Livestream – January 25th, 2024) – In this livestream we’ll take a look at the Havasu spatial table format and how Havasu can be used with GeoParquet. Be sure to subscribe to the Wherobots YouTube channel to keep up to date with more Wherobots livestreams and videos!

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