Abstract
ABSTRACTGeoportals have been the primary source of spatial information to researchers in diverse fields. Recent years have seen a growing trend to integrate spatial analysis and geovisual analytics inside Geoportals. Researchers could use the Geoportal to conduct basic analysis without offline processing. In practice, domain-specific analysis often requires researchers to integrate heterogeneous data sources, leverage new statistical models, or build their own customized models. These tasks are increasingly being tackled with open source tools in programming languages such as Python or R. However, it is unrealistic to incorporate the numerous open source tools in a Geoportal platform for data processing and analysis. This work provides an exploratory effort to bridge Geoportals and open source tools through Python scripting. The Geoportal demonstrated in this work is the Urban and Regional Explorer for China studies. A python package is provided to manipulate this platform in the local programming environment. The server side of the Geoportal implements a set of service endpoints that allows the package to upload, transform, and process user data and seamlessly integrate them into the existing datasets. A case study is provided that illustrated the use of this package to conduct integrated analyses of search engine data and baseline census data. This work attempts a new direction in Geoportal development, which could further promote the transformation of Geoportals into online analytical workbenches.
Highlights
Spatial data analysis has become increasingly popular in a wide array of social science disciplines, including public health, economics, crime, population, etc
The processing layer of Urban and Regional Explorer (URE) includes a set of modules for integrated spatial analytics that take advantage of both open source tools and customized spatial functions
Extending Geoportals are usually done by exposing services as APIs to researchers and developers
Summary
Spatial data analysis has become increasingly popular in a wide array of social science disciplines, including public health, economics, crime, population, etc. How to better harness the power of open source tools that handles heterogeneous big data sources remains a major challenge for the developers in building Geoportal applications Faced with such challenges, researchers are beginning to focus more on how to integrate other tools into existing platforms. Internet data do not follow a unified standard during the collection phase and can contain noise (Fan, Han, and Liu 2014; Gandomi and Haider 2015) This makes it difficult to integrate these heterogeneous datasets directly into an existing Geoportal. There have been some efforts in this direction, but this typically relies on developers to add special functions to process and link the data It is not possible and unrealistic for a platform developer to integrate all these big data sources.
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