Have you ever wondered how you could track your own logistics, or perhaps the location of your team in real time? Perhaps you want to verify that your inventory is located in the right location, whether that be closer to your customers or with simplified distribution. What about identifying where your raw material suppliers are, and how far they are from your physical location or customer’s location? These are a few examples of what geospatial analysis intends to answer.
Nowadays, there are many affordable and interesting solutions out there allowing any company to do many of these tasks. The problem is that each application has its own particularities and limitations, especially if the geolocation data needs to be combined with other types of data, such as your customer or supplier location, your transportation cost per hour/day, financial data, or marketing data.
Traditionally, all this has been solved with hundreds of Excel spreadsheets. The use of spreadsheets for those initiatives makes things even worse, as they are static, unscalable, and hard to maintain. We need to process faster data, scale it with more sources, and create even more complex analyses to be able to make decisions faster and more impactful. Luckily, we have Microsoft Fabric!
Understanding the Basics of Geospatial Analysis
Geospatial analysis involves collecting, combining, and visualizing various types of geospatial data, such as coordinates, addresses, polygons, images, and satellite imagery. Geospatial data can be used to model and represent how people, objects, and phenomena interact within space, as well as to make predictions based on trends in the relationships between places.
Microsoft Fabric offers the following capabilities to perform geospatial analysis:
- Scalable data storage: OneLake is a data lake service that allows to store and access any type of data, including geo-spatial data, in a secure and scalable way. OneLake supports various data formats, such as CSV, JSON, Parquet, and GeoJSON, and allows you to query and analyze the data using SQL, Spark, or Python.
- Data Engineering: Data Engineering provides a world-class Spark platform with authoring experiences, enabling data engineers to perform large-scale data transformation and democratize data. Data Engineering supports various libraries and frameworks for geo-spatial analysis, such as GeoSpark, GeoPandas, and GeoMesa, allowing to create and run notebooks and spark jobs using Python, Scala, or R.
- Data Science: Data Science supports various packages and modules for geo-spatial analysis, such as Shapely, Geoplot, and Folium, and allows any data analyst or data scientist to create and run notebooks and scripts using Python or R. Data Science also integrates with Azure Machine Learning, a machine learning service that helps manage, monitor, and optimize any machine learning lifecycle with low-code/no-code and no platform friction, as well as deploy your models as web services or IoT Edge modules.
- Real-Time Analytics: Real-Time Analytics provides a fast and scalable platform for streaming analytics and event processing using various technologies and tools, such as Azure Stream Analytics, Apache Kafka, and Azure Event Hubs. Real-Time Analytics supports various functions and operators for geo-spatial analysis, such as ST_DISTANCE, ST_INTERSECTS, and ST_WITHIN. Real-Time Analytics also integrates with Azure Synapse, a data warehouse service natively integrated with various tools and languages, such as Power BI, SQL, and Python.
- Business Intelligence: Business Intelligence is the experience that provides a rich and interactive platform for data visualization and reporting using various tools and features, such as Power BI, Azure Analysis Services, and Azure Data Explorer. Business Intelligence supports various visuals and maps for geo-spatial analysis, such as ArcGIS Maps, Shape Maps, and Filled Maps, and allows you to create and share dashboards and reports using various data sources and connectors, such as OneLake, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Cosmos DB.
Conclusion
Geospatial analysis is a powerful and useful technique that can help you understand and explore the spatial patterns and relationships of geographic phenomena, and make informed decisions and actions based on the insights. The traditional approach of using a plethora of tools for geospatial analysis, like GPS systems, signal tracking, and related solutions, is isolating and makes an end-to-end analytic approach difficult.
Microsoft Fabric, as an all-in-one analytics platform, overcomes this situation by offering simplicity, flexibility, scalability, security, and governance. It also offers a competitive advantage over other platforms, by providing a unified lakehouse, AI-powered analytics, and hybrid and multi-cloud support.
With Microsoft Fabric, you can unleash the full potential of your geospatial data and transform your business and organization with data-driven insights and actions.
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