If you follow us on Twitter at all you have probably seen our announcement of the Data Observatory. We are excited about the release and also excited about what it brings to the CartoDB community. While the Data Observatory looks like it is all about data, that’s the tip of the iceberg. Like we talked about previously, The Data Observatory is about prediction and all spatial data analysis for that matter. The reason the Data Observatory is important for CartoDB and the future of our platform is that the data we are publishing underpins exciting spatial analysis you will be able to use in the near future.
Let’s look at a few ways that the Data Observatory can make data analysis better!
1. Predict unknown possibilities from your known data
We’ve been spending a lot of time lately researching ways to predict future scenarios from data. The analyses we are working with all rely on special and powerful properties only contained in location data. The Data Observatory is where we’ll make that much of that underlying data available.
2. Find similar populations across huge geographic space
Many of the measures contained within the Data Observatory are available at high-resolutions over large areas. So you can know the same thing about a population in New York as a population across the country in San Diego. Using the property of sameness allows clients to build models to find new clients or new populations they are trying to reach. We hope soon you will all be able to access these methods.
3. Spend less time fighting with data and more time learning its secrets
One thing we’ve heard again and again before the Data Observatory was that getting many of these high-value datasets is hard. Many of our clients have shared this struggle. The Data Observatory is the first step toward making that process easier than ever before. There are many different ways you can access the Data Observatory, from accessing single measures at a point location to pulling entire sets of boundaries based on a bounding box. If you’ve ever fought with data before, you are going to love the Data Observatory.
Happy data mapping!