Business Intelligence Utilities
Business intelligence applications take collections of data and provide succinct analysis, usually in graphical or tabular form. Aggregating spatial data into visually useful proxies can be difficult as data volumes grow. Tools like spatial union or collection can only go so far.
This enhancement would provide a few common tools for turning a collection of spatial information into a single visualization.
- ST_FrequencySurface([pointarray]) would take in an array of points (a simple aggregate variant could also be provided) and create a surface based on the frequency of points falling close to one another. The resulting surface could be passed to heat mapping, contouring, or polygon creation functions.
- ST_InterpolatedSurface([pointarray]) would take in an array of points (a simple aggregate variant could also be provided) and create a surface based on the z-values of the points. This would be useful for creating surfaces from measuring stations or other point-based sensors.
- ST_HeatMap([surface]) would take in a gridded surface object and output a PNG bytearray suitable for streaming to a client program.
- ST_Contour([surface],minvalue,maxvalue,interval) would take in a gridded surface object and output a multilinestring of contours, with the magnitude value encoded in the z-ordinate. If minvalue equals maxvalue, only one contour line will be returned.
- ST_Cluster([pointarray]) would take in an array of points and return a set of points that represent the clustering of those points. The API here will need some extra work to encapsulate as many use cases as possible.
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The ISO SQL/MM model includes an extension for a topological coverage: a geometry model in which nodes and edges are the basic building blocks and area covers are built up from those primitives. This allows very fast tests for adjacency and geometry unions, as well as editing and simplifying shared lines.
Tracking collections of moving objects, querying the historical data for relationships, and maintaining alarms when objects enter/leave areas is now a very common use case. The objects might be trucks, planes, boats, people, and so on. A standard data model, support functions, and API for efficient handling of this case would be helpful.
Client software, particularly software that does coordinate system reprojection, requires the extent of a layer in order to integrate it with other layers. Spatial databases are generally slow at returning that information.