Book Image

Analytics for the Internet of Things (IoT)

By : Andrew Minteer
5 (1)
Book Image

Analytics for the Internet of Things (IoT)

5 (1)
By: Andrew Minteer

Overview of this book

We start with the perplexing task of extracting value from huge amounts of barely intelligible data. The data takes a convoluted route just to be on the servers for analysis, but insights can emerge through visualization and statistical modeling techniques. You will learn to extract value from IoT big data using multiple analytic techniques. Next we review how IoT devices generate data and how the information travels over networks. You’ll get to know strategies to collect and store the data to optimize the potential for analytics, and strategies to handle data quality concerns. Cloud resources are a great match for IoT analytics, so Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and PTC ThingWorx are reviewed in detail next. Geospatial analytics is then introduced as a way to leverage location information. Combining IoT data with environmental data is also discussed as a way to enhance predictive capability. We’ll also review the economics of IoT analytics and you’ll discover ways to optimize business value. By the end of the book, you’ll know how to handle scale for both data storage and analytics, how Apache Spark can be leveraged to handle scalability, and how R and Python can be used for analytic modeling.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

The basics of geospatial analysis


Before we jump into the fun stuff, we will cover some basic concepts. This will give context to how the analytics work behind the scenes.

Welcome to Null Island

If you have devices that report GPS location data, you will soon start to notice that many are visiting an area off the west coast of Africa. A new vacation destination, perhaps? Turns out this is a place called Null Island. If you have not heard of Null Island, it is located at precisely 0 latitude and 0 longitude. There is even a tourism website for it where you can get to know the culture and buy a T-shirt, as shown in the following screenshot:

Null Island location and website. Source: www.nullisland.com

But the place does not exist; it is an inside joke in the geospatial community. Missing coordinate values or null values are stored as 0 and 0 (latitude and longitude). Besides it giving insight into the sense of humor of the geospatial community, Null Island helps to introduce a key concept for geospatial...