Time flies! It is just over a year ago that we celebrated the official launch of Unfolded Studio. At that time we also shared our vision for addressing the hard problems in geospatial analytics, namely the handling of big data, geospatial unification and temporal analytics.
Today we are just as excited to announce the launch of Hex Tiles, which is our solution to the big problems we set out to tackle in that post
Briefly, Hex Tiles are a new analytics-focused geospatial tile system that builds on the H3 discrete global grid, and is designed from the ground up to handle planetery scale data, support seamless geospatial unification and enable large scale temporal analytics.
By transferring spatial data over the web in a tiled, tabular, gridded format, Hex Tiles make it trivial to unify and enrich massive spatial datasets, visualize them at all scales and incrementally conduct large sale analytics on-the-fly.
From Data Unification to Fluid Visualization in Just Minutes
Big data slowing you down? The Hex Tiles System is capable of processing hundreds of millions of rows of data in parallel, and is designed to easily ingest and unify spatial datasets of all types and sizes – going from data prep and unification to analysis in minutes, not days.
Once data has been hex tiled, CPU and browser memory limitations become a concern of the past.
Analytics At Any Scale
Hex Tiles are a new kind of analytics tile that encode data more efficiently than vector tiles and, unlike raster tiles, can be used for client-side analytics. While raster tiles contain an image file (say, satellite imagery), and vector tiles contain simple geographic data like points, lines or polygons, Hex Tiles contain analytic data aggregated using the H3 hierarchy, providing full spatial and temporal resolution while maintaining data integrity.
Because data is housed in tabular form in each analytic Hex Tile, it can include categorical data columns that can be bucketed, such as time, allowing for direct analysis and exploration of the data across both space and time.
While Hex Tiles can be used for performing interactive analysis without requiring any code, Hex Tiles are also available via the Unfolded Data SDK and are an excellent substrate for machine learning.
Get Started with Hex Tiles
To learn more:
- Watch the Hex Tile tutorials.
- Read the Hex Tiles documentation.
- Join the March 2 webinar to see how Hex Tiles can be used for site selection as one of its many applications.
Try Hex Tiles for free
Log in to Unfolded Studio to access the new Hex Tile datasets in the Data Catalog, ready for data enrichment, extraction and exploration.
Interested in learning more about how Hex Tiles can help you with large-scale data analysis and visualization? Contact us for a demo of Unfolded’s Enterprise features and learn how you can convert your own datasets to Hex Tiles to do site selection, similarity analysis and more.
