We are thrilled to welcome Stuart Lynn, PhD (Research Director and Senior Principal Software Engineer, CSDS + Herop) and Dylan Halpern, MS (Principal Software Engineer at CSDS) as
part of the Mansueto Lunch Colloquium Series to talk about their current work to develop:
A New Forever Open Platform for Spatial Data Analysis
Geospatial visualization is even more complex, and researchers need to consider a wide range of spatial scales and complex boundaries of polygons, the underlying uni- or bi-variate nature of maps, difficulties of diverse and unfamiliar
file formats (or databases), statistical and visual pitfalls like the ecological problem (MAUP), lack of errors bars, etc. Recent efforts in open source and start-up spaces provide a hopeful outlook. Open source development in analysis and visualization have
provided powerful tools like GeoDa (analysis and modeling) and
deck.gl (visualization)—but such tools are sometimes technically inaccessible to analysts. Start-up ventures offer clear insights and low-code tools for geospatial data, but longevity, data ownership,
and academic support may be uncertain.
To attempt to resolve these issues, two domains have opened up over the past 10 years.
In this talk Stuart and Dylan present the current state and future vision for a suite of open source tools that they are developing to try and bridge this divide. Over the course of the next year their goal is to develop an extensible,
modifiable suite of tools that can be used alone or together as part of a cohesive platform to make finding and sharing geospatial based insights easier. In this talk in particular they will focus on:
They will contrast their approach with existing proprietary platforms, particularly emphasize their focus on community management, data ownership and stewardship, collaborative investigation and extensibility.