Book Image

Geospatial Data Analytics on AWS

By : Scott Bateman, Janahan Gnanachandran, Jeff DeMuth
Book Image

Geospatial Data Analytics on AWS

By: Scott Bateman, Janahan Gnanachandran, Jeff DeMuth

Overview of this book

Managing geospatial data and building location-based applications in the cloud can be a daunting task. This comprehensive guide helps you overcome this challenge by presenting the concept of working with geospatial data in the cloud in an easy-to-understand way, along with teaching you how to design and build data lake architecture in AWS for geospatial data. You’ll begin by exploring the use of AWS databases like Redshift and Aurora PostgreSQL for storing and analyzing geospatial data. Next, you’ll leverage services such as DynamoDB and Athena, which offer powerful built-in geospatial functions for indexing and querying geospatial data. The book is filled with practical examples to illustrate the benefits of managing geospatial data in the cloud. As you advance, you’ll discover how to analyze and visualize data using Python and R, and utilize QuickSight to share derived insights. The concluding chapters explore the integration of commonly used platforms like Open Data on AWS, OpenStreetMap, and ArcGIS with AWS to enable you to optimize efficiency and provide a supportive community for continuous learning. By the end of this book, you’ll have the necessary tools and expertise to build and manage your own geospatial data lake on AWS, along with the knowledge needed to tackle geospatial data management challenges and make the most of AWS services.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to the Geospatial Data Ecosystem
4
Part 2: Geospatial Data Lakes using Modern Data Architecture
10
Part 3: Analyzing and Visualizing Geospatial Data in AWS
16
Part 4: Accessing Open Source and Commercial Platforms and Services

Understanding file formats

Now, let’s talk a bit about the different data formats used in these workflows. GIS is still consumed with the ubiquitous shapefile, but there are a lot of up-and-coming big data formats with promising potential. Shapefiles work great on AWS and Redshift, which is an AWS-managed data warehouse service that actually has full support to ingest shapefiles natively. This is an incredibly powerful way to work with geospatial data in shapefiles. You can easily script ETL jobs to run on AWS so that when a shapefile is uploaded to S3, our simple object storage service, S3 triggers an event, and those shapefiles are picked up and ingested into Redshift for processing. The shapefiles are then immediately queryable and available to other analytic applications and services.

Next to shapefiles, I am seeing JSON and GeoJSON as preferred formats. Many users are familiar with the easy-to-read and write JSON syntax. There has been some standardization done in the...