36 - Working with GIS data
I learned a ton about GIS’s ( Geographic Information System) today! It was prompted by the MapBox map in Superset that I posted yesterday. I think the results are really cool, but I was hoping to make something more interactive than just a dashboard.
I also was thinking about other datasources from the hackathon that I could incorporate, and am really interested in the Ursa Space data which is global SAR/satellite data. In order to use that I’m going to have to learn how to work with GIS data, among other things. For example, the SAR data is raster data, meaning that it’s similar to your computer screen - pixels with values. However, the census and Zillow data are best represented by Polygons in WKT (Well Known Text) format.
In order to combine the data, one can use a tool like H3, which is a project open-sourced by Uber. H3 uses Hexagons to fill a map and does some cool math to make queries and combining data quick.
I got the US Census Data with Polygons from census.gov and am using geopandas to load the data; however, filling the maps with tiny hexagons is proving challenging for my computer, so I may have to run the compute on EC2.
My goal with the SAR data is to use it to measure the urban development.
I'm a freelance software developer located in Denver, Colorado. If you're
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