This Month In Wherobots Archives

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

Posted on August 1, 2024 by Ben Pruden

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 are Sean Knight and Ilya Marchenko from YuzuData where they focus on AI and location intelligence for the commercial real estate industry. YuzuData is a Wherobots partner and leverages the power of Apache Sedona and Wherobots Cloud as part of their work analyzing large scale geospatial data. Sean and 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 Sean and Ilya from YuzuData 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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New Wherobots Cloud Features, How Overture Maps Uses Apache Sedona, Aircraft Data, & Spatial Lakehouses

Posted on June 6, 2024 by Ben Pruden

Welcome to This Month In Wherobots the monthly developer newsletter for the Wherobots & Apache Sedona community! In this edition we have a look at the latest Wherobots Cloud release, how the Overture Maps Foundation uses Apache Sedona to generate their data releases, processing a billion aircraft observations, building spatial data lakehouses with Iceberg Havasu, the new Apache Sedona 1.6.0 release, and more!

Introducing WherobotsAI For Planetary Inference And Capabilities That Modernize Spatial Intelligence At Scale

Wherobots announced significant new features in Wherobots Cloud to enable machine learning inference on satellite imagery via SQL, new Python and Java database drivers for interacting with WherobotsDB in your own analytics applications or data orchestration tooling, and a scalable vector tiles generator. These new enhancements are available now in Wherobots Cloud.

Read The Blog Post or Register For The Webinar

Making Overture Maps Data More Efficient With GeoParquet And Apache Sedona

The Overture Maps Foundation publishes an open comprehensive global map dataset with layers for transportation, places, 3D buildings, and administrative boundaries. This data comes from multiple sources and is published in cloud-native GeoParquet format made publicly available for download in cloud object storage. In order to wrangle such a large planetary-scale dataset the Overture team uses Apache Sedona to prepare, process, and generate partitioned GeoParquet files. This blog post dives into the benefits of GeoParquet, how Overture uses Sedona to generate GeoParquet (including a dual Geohash partitioning and sorting method), and how to query and analyze the Overture Maps dataset using Wherobots Cloud.

Read the article: Making Overture Maps Data More Efficient With GeoParquet And Apache Sedona

Featured Community Member: Feng Jiang

Our featured Apache Sedona and Wherobots Community Member this month is Feng Jiang, a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft where he works with map and geospatial data at scale. Through his involvement with the Overture Maps Foundation he also helps maintain and publish the public Overture Maps dataset. In the blog post "Making Overture Maps Data More Efficient With GeoParquet And Apache Sedona" he shared some insights gained from working with Apache Sedona at Overture in the pipeline used to create and generate GeoParquet data of planetary-scale map data. Thanks for your contributions and being a part of the Apache Sedona community!

Processing A Billion Aircraft Observations With Apache Sedona In Wherobots Cloud

An important factor to consider when analyzing aircraft data is the potential impact of weather and especially severe weather events on aircraft flights. This tutorial uses public ADS-B aircraft trace data combined with weather data to identify which flights have the highest potential to be impacted by severe weather events. We also see how to combine real-time Doppler radar raster data as well as explore the performance of working with a billion row dataset for spatial operations like point-in-polygon searches and spatial joins.

Read The Tutorial: Processing A Billion Aircraft Observations With Apache Sedona In Wherobots Cloud

Training Series: Large-Scale Geospatial Analytics With Graphs And The PyData Ecosystem

Choosing the right tool for the job is an important aspect of data science, and equally important is understanding how the tools fit together and can be used alongside each other. This hands-on workshop shows how to leverage the scale of Apache Sedona with Wherobots Cloud for geospatial data processing, alongside common Python tooling like Geopandas, and how to add graph analytics using Neo4j to our analysis toolkit. Using a dataset of species observations we build a species interaction graph to find which species share habitat overlap, a common workflow for conservation use cases.

Watch The Workshop Recording: Large Scale Geospatial Analytics With Graphs And The PyData Ecosystem

Apache Sedona 1.6 Release

Version 1.6.0 of Apache Sedona is now available! This version includes support for Shapely 2.0 and GeoPandas 0.11.1+, enhanced support for geography data, new vector and raster functions, and tighter integration Python raster data workflows with support for Rasterio and NumPy User Defined Functions (UDFs). You can learn more about this release in the release notes.

Read The Apache Sedona 1.6 Release Notes

Building Spatial Data Lakehouses With Iceberg Havasu

This talk from Subsurface 2024 introduces the Havasu spatial table format, an extension of Apache Iceberg used to build spatial data lakehouses. We learn about the motivation for adding spatial functionality to Iceberg, how Havasu Iceberg enables efficient spatial queries for both vector and raster data, and how to use familiar SQL table interface when building large-scale geospatial analytics applications.

Watch The Recording: Building Spatial Data Lakehouses With Iceberg Havasu

Upcoming Events

GeoParquet Meetup SF (San Francisco – June 12) – Join the Geoparquet community Wednesday June 12th from 5:30-7pm at 9zero, the climate tech community space. Welcoming participants from across the geospatial and data ecosystem to discuss the latest enhancements and extensions to GeoParquet.
Live Demo: Processing A Billion Aircraft Observations Combined With Weather Raster Data On Wherobots Cloud (Online – June 20th) – This live demo will show how to analyze real-world aircraft observations and weather data to identify flights impacted by severe weather events.
Wherobots Cloud Release Overview: Introducing WherobotsAI, Spatial SQL API, & Vector Tiles (Online – July 10th) – Join the product management and engineering team at Wherobots for an overview of Wherobots 1.3 and the latest capabilities we are bringing for extensibility and AI.
Apache Sedona Community Office Hour (Online – July 2nd) – 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.

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Raster Data Analysis, Processing Petabytes of Agronomic Data, Overview of Sedona 1.5, and Unlocking The Spatial Frontier – This Month In Wherobots

Posted on March 13, 2024May 29, 2024 by Ben Pruden

Raster Data Analysis, Processing Petabytes of Agronomic Data, Overview of Sedona 1.5, and Unlocking The Spatial Frontier – This Month In Wherobots

Welcome to This Month In Wherobots, the monthly newsletter for data practitioners in the Apache Sedona and Wherobots community. This month we’re exploring raster data analysis with Spatial SQL, processing petabytes of agronomic data with Apache Sedona, a deep dive on new features added in the 1.5 release series, and an overview of working with files in Wherobots Cloud.

Raster Data Analysis With Spatial SQL & Apache Sedona

One of the strengths of Apache Sedona and Wherobots Cloud is the ability to work with large scale vector and raster geospatial data together using Spatial SQL. This post (and video) takes a look at how to get started working with raster data in Sedona using Spatial SQL and some of the use cases for raster data analysis including vector / raster join operations, zonal statistics, and using raster map algebra.

Read The Article: Raster Data Analysis With Spatial SQL & Apache Sedona

Featured Community Member: Luiz Santana

This month’s Wherobots & Apache Sedona featured community member is Luiz Santana. Luiz is Co-Founder and CTO of Leaf Agriculture. He has extensive experience as a former data architect and developer. Luiz has a PhD in Computer Science from Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina and spent time researching data processing and integration in highly scalable environments. Leaf Agriculture is building the unified API for food and agriculture by leveraging large-scale agronomic data. Luiz has given several presentations at conferences such as Apache Sedona: How To Process Petabytes of agrnomic data with Spark, and Perspectives on the use of data in Agriculture, which covers how Leaf uses Apache Sedona to analyze large-scale agricultural data and how Sedona fits into their stack alongside other technologies. Thank you Luiz for your work with the Apache Sedona and Wherobots community and sharing your knowledge and experience!

Apache Sedona: How To Process Petabytes of Agronomic Data With Spark

In this presentation from The Developer’s Conference Luiz Santana shares the experience of using Apache Sedona at Leaf Agriculture to process petabytes of agronomic data from satellites, agricultural machines, drones and other sensors. He discusses how Leaf uses Sedona for tasks such as geometry intersections, geographic searches, and polygon transformations with high performance and speed. Luiz also presented Perspectives On The Use of Data in Agriculture which covers some of the data challenges that Leaf handles and an overview of the technologies used to address these challenges, including Apache Sedona.

See The Slides From The Presentation

Working With Files – Getting Started With Wherobots Cloud

This post takes a look at loading and working with our own data in Wherobots Cloud as well as creating and saving data as the result of our analysis, such as the end result of a data pipeline. It covers importing files in various formats including CSV, GeoJSON, Shapefile, and GeoTIFF in Wherobots Cloud, working with AWS S3 cloud object storage, and creating GeoParquet files using Apache Sedona.

Read The Post: Working With Files – Getting Started With Wherobots Cloud

Introducing Sedona 1.5: Making Sedona the most comprehensive & scalable spatial data processing and ETL engine for both raster and vector data

The 1.5 series of Apache Sedona represents a leap forward in geospatial processing that adds essential features and enhancements to make Sedona a comprehensive, all-in-one cluster computing engine for geospatial vector and raster data analysis. This post covers XYZM coordinates and SRID, vector and raster joins, raster data manipulation, visualization with SedonaKepler and SedonaPyDeck, GeoParquet reading and writing, H3 hexagons, and new cluster compute engine support.

Read The Post: Introducing Sedona 1.5 – Making Sedona The Most Comprehensive & Scalable Spatial Data Processing and ETL Engine For Both Raster and Vector Data

Unlocking the Spatial Frontier: The Evolution and Potential of spatial technology in Apple Vision Pro and Augmented Reality Apps

Apple adopted the term “spatial computing” when announcing the Apple Vision Pro to describe its new augmented reality platform. This post from Wherobots CEO Mo Sarwat examines spatial computing in the context of augmented reality experiences to explore spatial object localization and presentation and the role of spatial query processing and spatial data analytics in Apple Vision Pro.

Read The Post: Unlocking The Spatial Frontier

Upcoming Events

Apache Sedona Community Office Hour – (Online Zoom Call – April 9, 2024) – Join the Apache Sedona community on the second Tuesday of each month 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.
Training Series – Large Scale Geospatial Analytics With Graphs And The PyData Ecosystem – (Online – March 26, 2024) – For our monthly livestream this month we’re partnering with our friends at Neo4j for a live virtual training series focused on geospatial analytics, the PyData ecosystem, and how graphs and Neo4j can be used alongside Apache Sedona and Wherobots Cloud to make sense of geospatial data. Register for free here.
Subsurface Conference – Havasu: A Table Format For Spatial Attributes In A Data Lake Architecture (Online – May 2, 2024) – This talk at the Subsurface Live conference will introduce the Havasu open table format that extends Apache Iceberg to support spatial data.
SW2 Conference – Cloud Native Geospatial Analytics With Apache Sedona, GeoParquet and Apache Iceberg (Denver – May 15, 2024) – This talk will cover recent developments in the cloud-native data ecosystem that address analyzing geospatial data at scale including Apache Sedona for executing large scale spatial queries, GeoParquet an optimized storage format for efficiently managing spatial data, and the Havasu extension to the Apache Iceberg open table format for managing tables in a spatial data lakehouse.

SedonaSnow: Apache Sedona On Snowflake, Accelerating Your GIS Pipeline, Exploring Global Fishing Watch Data With GeoParquet, and Apache Sedona 1.5.1 Release

Posted on February 6, 2024May 29, 2024 by Ben Pruden

Welcome to This Month In Wherobots the monthly developer newsletter for the Wherobots & Apache Sedona community! In this edition we cover SedonaSnow: Apache Sedona on Snowflake, accelerating your GIS pipeline with Apache Sedona, exploring Global Fishing Watch public data with SedonaDB and GeoParquet, and a look at new features and updates in the 1.5.1 release of Apache Sedona.

Apache Sedona Now Available In Snowflake Marketplace: SedonaSnow

Apache Sedona, the scalable open-source geospatial compute engine is now available on Snowflake via the Snowflake Marketplace or via manual installation. The SedonaSnow plugin brings Apache Sedona’s Spatial SQL functionality to Snowflake via 130+ Sedona SQL "ST" SQL functions that can be used alongside Snowflake SQL.

Featured Community Members: Alihan Zihna & Fernando Ayuso Palacios

This month’s Wherobots & Apache Sedona featured community members are Alihan Zihna, Lead Data Scientist at CKDelta and Fernando Palacios, Director of Data Science & Data Engineering also at CKDelta. Alihan and Fernando presented "GIS Pipeline Acceleration With Apache Sedona" at the Data + AI Summit where they share how they were able to improve the performance and innovation of their geospatial analysis pipelines, going from a pipeline that took 48 hours to complete down to 10 minutes using Apache Sedona. Thank you Fernando and Alihan for being a part of the community and sharing your work!

GIS Pipeline Acceleration With Apache Sedona

In this presentation from Data + AI Summit, Fernando and Alihan discuss some of the various usecases for working with large-scale geospatial data at conglomerate CKDelta, part of the Hutchinson Group which operates ports, utility networks, retail stores and mobile telecom networks with hundreds of millions of users across dozens of countries. They discuss how geospatial analytics at scale is important for identifying water leakage in their utility network, understanding customer satisfaction, identifying sites for electric vehicle charging station installation, and forecasting the supply and demand of energy. They provide a technical overview of Apache Sedona and share the results of improving and extending their geospatial analytics pipelines including one process that reduced running time from 48 hours to 10 minutes using Apache Sedona.

Watch the recording of "GIS Pipeline Acceleration With Apache Sedona"

The Wherobots Notebook Environment – Getting Started With Wherobots Cloud & SedonaDB Part 2

In Part 2 of our Getting Started With Wherobots Cloud & SedonaDB series we dive into the Wherobots Notebook Environment including how to configure and start notebook runtimes, an overview of the sample notebooks included in Wherobots Cloud, and how to use version control like git with notebooks. If you missed it check out Part 1: An Overview of Wherobots Cloud or sign up for a free Wherobots Cloud account to get started directly.

Exploring Global Fishing Watch Public Data With SedonaDB & GeoParquet

This post is a hands-on look at offshore ocean infrastructure and industrial vessel activity with SedonaDB using data from Global Fishing Watch. We also see how GeoParquet can be used with this data to improve the efficiency of data retrieval and enable large-scale geospatial visualization using GeoArrow and the Lonboard Python visualization library.

Read "Exploring Global Fishing Watch Public Data With SedonaDB & GeoParquet"

Apache Sedona 1.5.1 Release

The most recent release of Apache Sedona introduces some exciting new updates including support for Spark 3.5, 20+ new raster functions, 7 new vector functions, support for running Sedona in Snowflake with SedonaSnow, updates to Sedona’s GeoParquet reader and writer, and more! The updated raster functions include RS_ZonalStats for computing zonal statistics, RS_Tile and RS_TileExplode to enable tiling large rasters, and updates to RS_MapAlgebra to enable user defined raster functions that can work across multiple rasters. Updated vector functions include ST_IsValidReason which exposes the reason geometries might not be valid, and ST_LineLocatePoint which can be useful for map matching and snapping data to road networks.

Hands-On With Havasu and GeoParquet

Each month you can find a new livestream tutorial on the Wherobots YouTube channel. January’s livestream was all about working with GeoParquet and Havasu tables in SedonaDB. We dig in to understanding some of the optimizations built into the Apache Parquet format to learn how Parquet delivers efficient data storage and data retrieval before exploring the GeoParquet specification for storing geospatial data in Parquet. We cover loading, analyzing, and creating GeoParquet files using SedonaDB with a focus on comparing performance of various GeoParquet partitioning strategies. Finally, we see how the Havasu extension to the Apache Iceberg table format enables working with both vector and raster geospatial data backed by GeoParquet but with the familiar developer experience of SQL tables.

Watch The Recording: Hands-On With Havasu And GeoParquet

Upcoming Events

Apache Sedona Community Office Hour (Online Zoom Call – February 13, 2024) – 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.
Raster Data Analysis With Spatial SQL & SedonaDB (Online Livestream – February 29th, 2024) – This month our livestream is focused on raster data analysis. We’ll see how to load raster data in SedonaDB and perform raster operations like map algebra and zonal statistics using Spatial SQL. Be sure to subscribe to the Wherobots YouTube channel to keep up to date with more Wherobots livestreams and videos!

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Introducing The Havasu Spatial Table Format, Wherobots 2023 In Review, Analyzing Overture Maps and Real Estate Data: This Month In Wherobots

Posted on January 3, 2024May 29, 2024 by Ben Pruden

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!

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.

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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The Biggest Apache Sedona Release Ever, Wherobots Cloud Launch, Building Maps With Felt & Self Service Geospatial Analytics – This Month In Wherobots

Posted on December 1, 2023May 29, 2024 by Ben Pruden

Welcome to This Month In Wherobots where we highlight the latest goings on from the Wherobots & Apache Sedona community. In this edition we’re taking a look at the largest release ever in the history of Apache Sedona, the latest SedonaDB and Wherobots Cloud launch, self-service geospatial analytics, building maps with Felt, and a look at the Wherobots Online Community.

Featured Community Members: Nara Khou & Cort Lunke

Each month we highlight special members of the community who contribute their expertise and passion to the Wherobots and Apache Sedona community. This month’s featured community members are Nara Khou Lead Data Engineer at Land O’Lakes and Cort Lunke Data & Analytics Lead at Land O’Lakes. Earlier this year Nara and Cort presented "Self-Service Geospatial Analytics Built On Databricks, Apache Sedona and R" at Databricks’ Data+AI Summit. Thanks so much Nara and Cort for sharing your success story using Apache Sedona with the community!

Self-Service Geospatial Analytics Built On Databricks, Apache Sedona And R

In this presentation Nara and Cort discuss some of the challenges of working with spatial data and how Apache Sedona can be used to address some of these difficulties in an enterprise data environment like Databricks. Cort and Nara share why they chose Apache Sedona for working with spatial data at scale to analyze watershed and cropland data. They discuss the data processing pipeline used for the project and demo the end to end data pipeline from data collection, processing and analysis using Apache Sedona, and visualization using R-Studio – all within Databricks.

Watch the recording of Nara & Cort’s Data+AI Summit Presentation

SedonaDB & Wherobots Cloud Launch

The Wherobots team was excited to reveal SedonaDB, the cloud-native spatial analytics database platform at the FOSS4G North America conference. SedonaDB builds upon the scability and stability of the Apache Sedona project bringing large-scale geospatial analytics capabilities to enterprises looking for a cloud-native solution. SedonaDB also introduces the Havasu open table format which enables efficient querying and updating of geometry and raster columns in Parquet files stored in cloud object stores such as AWS S3.

Get started with SedonaDB on Wherobots Cloud Free tier today.

Apache Sedona 1.5 Release

The most recent release of Apache Sedona v1.5.0 was the biggest release in the history of Apache Sedona. This release includes native support for Uber H3 hexagon functions, comprehensive raster ETL and analytics support, more ST functions to enable new geospatial workloads, XYZM support, and visualization with SedonaKepler and SedonaPyDeck. This version is also available in the official Apache Sedona Docker Image. You can find more about this release in the Apache Sedona GitHub repository and read more about the v1.5.0 Apache Sedona release here.

Learn more about the latest Apache Sedona release

Building Maps With Felt

An important requirement for data infrastructure tools like SedonaDB and Wherobots Cloud are that they integrate well with the technology ecosystems around them. In the world of spatial databases this includes geospatial visualization tooling like the web-based mapping tool Felt. This blog post shows how to integrate the Felt API with Wherobots Cloud so we can leverage SedonaDB’s geospatial analysis capabilities using Spatial SQL then publish the results of our analysis to Felt’s beautiful web-based mapping tooling. This example uses data from BirdBuddy, which publishes data about bird sightings at its smart birdfeeders to find the range of some of our favorite bird species.

Read the blog post "Creating Collaborative Web Maps With The Felt API And Wherobots Cloud".

The Wherobots Online Community Launch

The Wherobots Online Community is the forum for community members to come together, ask questions, and share their expertise and excitement about spatial analytics. This site was launched earlier this month and we’re excited to have a home for the community. Please feel free to join the community, introduce yourself, and share what you’re working on and why you’re excited about spatial analytics! We’ve also launched the Wherobots YouTube Channel as a way to share educational content about spatial analytics – please check it out and subscribe.

Join The Wherobots Online Community

Upcoming Events

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.
Analyzing Real Estate Data Using SedonaDB & Wherobots Cloud (Online Livestream – December 12th, 2023) – In this livestream we’ll take a look at analyzing US real estate data at the county level, using data from Zillow and Natural Earth. We’ll introduce the Wherobots Cloud platform and SedonaDB using Python and Spatial SQL. Be sure to subscribe to the Wherobots YouTube channel to keep up to date with more Wherobots livestreams and videos!

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