MapD gets granular on spatio-temporal data
What’s better than data analytics?
Well, one answer is Marmite mixed with peanut butter and orange marmalade, obviously.
MapD Technologies thinks it can go one better.
The company’s spin doctors have unabashedly labelled its product not analytics, but Extreme Analytics™ — with a fancy trademark and everything. So can MapD substantiate and technically validate this grandeur, or is this just another case of marketingspeak?
Open source at its heart, MapD 4.0 is a software product designed to handle large-scale interactive geospatial analytics.
The technology has been built with native support for geospatial data from the start and is tightly integrated with a GPU-based rendering engine. So what is it used for?
MapD 4.0 might be applied to location intelligence use cases such as:
- Visually uncovering the relationship between demographic data and spending patterns on a map.
- Uncovering driver behaviour patterns from connected vehicle telemetry.
- Gauging cellular signal strength variances in a city, down to the block [street] level.
“Organisations are dealing every day with a deluge of location enriched data, from always-on mobile devices, IoT enabled objects, connected vehicles and location-stamped transactions. Many analytics tools lack the capabilities to handle this spatio-temporal data at granular levels. This represents a massive opportunity cost for all large businesses and government agencies,” said Venkat Krishnamurthy, Veep of product management, MapD.
Krishnamurthy claims that MapD 4.0 could give geospatial analytics to everyone, from techies right ‘down’ to citizen data scientists.
Delivered in open source, cloud and enterprise editions, MapD has been applied in telecom, financial services, defense and intelligence, automotive, retail, pharmaceutical, advertising and academia.
For geospatial analysts, MapD 4.0 natively supports geometry and geographic data types such as points, lines, polygons and multipolygons, as well as key spatial operators. A newly-enhanced rendering engine means users can now query and visualise up to millions of polygons and billions of points.
According to Krishnamurthy, “MapD 4.0 helps users ask questions and explore trends that were once too large or difficult to answer. Computation-heavy challenges are now possible at extreme speed, such as identifying two cargo trucks in one area, moving in the same direction and at the same time, while calculating their speed. Similarly, for retail, city planning or marketing purposes, users can create or select a customized geographic area anywhere in the world and instantly view demographic information in that area.”
In addition to its expanded polygon and rendering engine improvements, MapD 4.0 offers a number of improvements for enterprise-readiness that make it easier to support machine learning, access management and collaboration.
Showboating and marketingspeak?
Not so much, this is complex stuff, yes… extreme even, that appears to be well packaged and presented for a fascinating new use case stream.