Company
Date Published
Author
Javier de la Torre
Word count
1607
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

CARTO's Data Observatory 2.0, now powered by Google BigQuery, is a new platform for discovering and consuming location data for spatial analysis. The platform provides a scalable and robust data warehouse with strong geospatial support, utilizing Google Cloud and BigQuery capabilities. It hosts all data within the DO in BigQuery, using a smart metadata system to register thousands of datasets, which are spatially indexed and fully cataloged. The platform relies on cloud-based components to populate, process, and create different data products. CARTO and BigQuery's collaboration is seen as a game-changer for spatial data infrastructure, offering benefits such as separation of computation from storage, scalability, multitenancy, extensibility, and geo support. Public data will be made available through the platform, including US Census Bureau American Community Survey and environmental datasets. The partnership aims to make spatial data more accessible to Data Scientists and geospatial experts, while leveraging tools like CARTO and BigQuery to create a fully invested GIS data access analysis and visualization solution.