Some days ago the good people from Universal Mind open the beta program for their new product called SpatialKey. For those who are not in the Flex community, Universal Mind is a very recognized company developing Rich Internet Applications. So it was a great pleasure when I saw months ago that they were working on a new geospatial product for data analysis.
I was lucky to get an invitation to the beta program and be able to take a look. They are promising some great things, but for the moment the beta is limited in certain ways I will describe later. The best to get an overview of it is to watch some of their ubercool videos (maybe too much for my taste).
I wanted to give it a try as soon as possible, and coincidentally I just finished working on the new WDPA-GBIF widget. The widget allows you to visualize biodiversity primary data, from GBIF, for all protected areas in the world. Check out for example the protected areas in Australia. Then select for example an area like the Great Barrier Reef. You will be able to download the data in multiple formats.
With this I downloaded the data for the Canadian Rocky Mountains and imported it in SpatialKey. The import now is limited to 10.000 records and 25 columns, so I had to delete multiple columns and records. I think SpatialKey should allow the discard of the data visually when it is already uploaded.
With SpatialKey you manage separately your datasets and the reports you create based on them. The reports right now are not exportable to the outside. I mean, you can not print or distribute as a widget the report you have created. I know they are working on it, but for the time being I only have 2 possibilities to show you how it looks like: share my report with everybody that gives me his email, or just do a little screencast for everybody to watch here. For the first one if someone is really interested to get into the system to take a look, send me an email. the screencast is following:
So here goes the things that I like a lot:
- The heatmaps are just gorgeous. I would love to know how they do it.
- The timeline filter is great. Has some usability issues but is great.
- The way grids are displayed for summaries. The hover effect is very good and the tooltip very clear.
- The filter "pods" are nice, but I wonder what would happen when you have thousands of hundreds records to search or select on. I suppose that when there is lot of data only the search would be enabled and not the selection.
- Great look and feel.
Other comments following:
- Is it necessary to refresh on every map movement? I understand it is on the zoom and if you have the filter by visible area disabled.
- Not having the possibility right now to share the reports as widgets to embed on the blog.
- It would be nice to also let the user provide a polygon or geometry to define the boundaries of the analysis. In this case for example would help a lot to visualize the borders of the protected area.
And finally, the things I really wonder how they work internally:
- The heatmaps!
- The data structures they use for dynamically regrouping the data on the client.
- If it is true that they can handle millions of records, how does the server infrastructure looks like. I know it is Java, but what about the data store, how can they handle the creation of dynamic indexes or how do they do it? Would it work with GBIF data?
My general impression of the tool is great. It looks awesome and works really well. It looks very similar to some of the ideas we have for developing analytical tools for biodiversity data with GBIF. Tim give your impressions please!
I would love to see more and more such analytical tools for biodiversity. How they call them? Something like Bussiness Intelligence, I think we need some of this in our community. For the time being I will try to get into talks with Universal Mind on the applicability of SpatialKey for huge biodiversity primary data like GBIF.
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