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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