“What used to run in days now takes minutes.” – Stuart Penninger, Solutions Engineer at Esri
Data analysts can now search terra bytes of data – even petabytes – in an instant. Esri’s ArcGIS GeoAnalytics On-Demand Engine puts GIS expertise in the hands of data. The On-Demand Engine is an interface for Apache Spark that provides a collection of spatial SQL functions and spatial analysis tools using Python code. Data analysts can now carry out spatial analysis workflows within an organization’s Cloud platforms or existing infrastructure.
Stuart Penninger, an ESRI Solutions Engineer, demonstrated the capabilities at GEOINT 2022 in Denver: “We’re bringing ESRI spatial capabilities to data scientists with the synthesis of SPARK and ESRI.”
The GeoAnalytics Engine uses the Geographic approach by centering analysis on vector data. With a 16 billion record dataset including ESRI’s ArcGIS Living Atlas and the use of Landsat and Sentinel imagery, new and existing data can be sorted and filtered to find data relevant to your geographic areas of interest. Built to integrate with commonly used languages and platforms, such as PYTHON and SPARK, data scientist can now wield the power of GIS expertise through a user-friendly dashboard interface and simple visualization of spatial data. The GeoAnalytics Engine is equipped with 120 spatial tools offering customizable sets of functions.
Users define their own parameters including time and space when creating Spark DataFrames, optimized for distributed queries. Relevant observation and analytics applications are limitless: floodzone changes, supply chain analysis, agricultural assessments, tracking population movements, developing retail strategies, crime patterning, and development challenges are just a few. Specific windows of time in exact places can inform nearly any sector public or private. Tracking dwell-time and movement is “near real time” using temporal relations or time stepping.
Extraction, Transformation and Loading, or ETL, takes a fraction of the time it previously did. The implications for modern cargo, traffic, weather, and personnel movements are game-changing.
