May 2019 Summaries

Upgrading our Core Platform to PostgreSQL 11` The global datasphere is expected to expand by 10x from 2018 to 2025, driven by the creation and sharing of large amounts of data. To keep pace with this growth, technology must advance to store and transform data into information efficiently. CARTO's platform is built on top of PostgreSQL, providing users with full control over their data. The company will be upgrading its software stack to PostgreSQL 11 and PostGIS 2.5 to meet increasing performance needs, introducing improvements in stability, security, and performance. These advancements enable larger database handling, improved geospatial indexing, and enhanced Mapbox vector tile generation, making it easier to scale spatial tables and generate tiles with complex polygons more efficiently. The upgrade aligns with CARTO's commitment to open source and Postgres, creating value for customers and the tech community while driving innovation in Location Intelligence solutions.

CARTO has acquired Geographica, a leading partner with over 12 years of experience in the geospatial consulting industry, to expand its professional services offering and strengthen its client support. The acquisition aims to address the challenge of finding cutting-edge customer-centric providers of spatial consulting services, which account for approximately half of all business in the geospatial industry. Geographica brings expertise in Spatial Modelling and Machine Learning, having successfully customized the CARTO platform for enterprise clients. As part of the acquisition, CARTO will roll out new services programs to unveil new ways customers can leverage its technologies to solve complex spatial problems. The team from Geographica will join CARTO's headquarters in Seville, Spain, marking a strategic move to enhance customer service and collaboration.

The urban-rural divide in America has significant implications for healthcare access, with rural areas facing a doctor shortage and healthcare disparities. Traditional methods for assessing healthcare accessibility have limitations, including ignoring patient agency and not accounting for congestion or multiple travel modes. Researchers Jamie Saxon and Daniel Snow developed the Rational Agent Access Model (RAAM), which uses an agent-based simulation to incorporate multiple costs, including congestion and travel time, and can scale to the national level. The RAAM model was applied to create a comprehensive origin-destination matrix of the entire United States, allowing for a nuanced understanding of healthcare access and its relationship with education level. The results show that areas in Utah and Southern Texas have high costs for accessing care, but also highlight the importance of considering multiple factors beyond just population density. The RAAM model has the potential to improve our understanding of access measures beyond healthcare, including access to jobs and public services.

The team at CARTO, a location intelligence platform provider, created an interactive Game of Thrones map trivia game using their powerful Location Intelligence platform, specifically CARTO VL. They brainstormed various ideas before landing on creating a map where users could answer questions about locations in the show. The final product is a static frontend application with Parcel that transpiles and bundles the code, including a GeoJSON file for location data and a map.js file for visualization setup and interactivity handling. The game has an intermediate difficulty level, social share functionality, images of characters and descriptions based on scores, and allows users to submit questions of their own. The team used various tools and leveraged CARTO VL for responsive visualization, making the game easy to build and deploy.

Must-Follow Twitter Accounts for Spatial Data Science is a list of 50 accounts that cover various aspects of spatial data science, including data science experts, geospatial news and events, open source advocates, academics, and academic programs. The list aims to provide a diverse sample of particularly active accounts in the field, with many of them transcending categories. Following these accounts will help keep your thumb on the pulse of the latest technological advances, research, and opportunities in spatial data science.