Day: 14th March 2018

@esri_spain workshops about #bigdata, #arcgis, #ML and much more

  geoc

From February 21th to 22th, at Jaume I University – Castellon de la Plana (Spain) a set of courses were held by Esri Spain. Workshop’s main topics were about detecting spatial patterns, analyzing big data and applying ML with ArcGIS platform.

During two days over 20 students – from the Geo-C project and Mastergeotech students – attended the lectures given by Alberto Céspedes and Dariya Ordanovich from Esri Spain. By the presentation of several examples, Alberto and Dariya explained how concepts like Machine Learning, Spatial Big Data, and Spatial Patterns fit into ArcGIS.

Initially, Alberto Céspedes taught how to use Insights for ArcGIS creating easy-to-use dashboards which integrate spatial and tabular data for contextual analysis. Insights for ArcGIS is a web-based tool for data analytics that delivers an integrated view of the results, including charts, graphs, and maps.

The applicability of machine learning algorithms using ArcGIS tools was also presented during these workshops by the application of image detection for an extensive amount of satellite images. Geo-analytics tools from ArcGIS Pro provides a better understanding of an enormous amount of spatial data, integrating data web services with spatial geoprocessing tools.

Finally, Dariya Ordanovich illustrated how to connect, install and use R with ArcGIS, making use of the R-Bridge for ArcGIS. This open source project allows R users to work with ArcGIS data, and ArcGIS users to leverage the analysis capabilities of R.

For more information, about the tools used during this workshop, visit

“Improving Transparency through Web Maps”, paper accepted for presentation at the 4th International Smart City Workshop.

  geoc

The paper Improving Transparency through Web Maps (by Auriol Degbelo and Tomi Kauppinen) has been accepted for presentation at the 4th International Smart City Workshop, co-located with the Web Conference.

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed progress of public institutions in making their datasets available online, free of charge, for re-use. This notwithstanding, there is still a long way to go to put the power of data in the hands of citizens. This article suggests that transparency in the context of open government can be increased through web maps featuring: i) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which support app and data usage tracking; and (ii) `transparency badges’ which inform the users about the presence/absence of extra, useful contextual information. Eight examples of web maps are introduced as proof of concept for the idea. Designing and implementing these web maps has reminded of the need of interactive guidelines to help non-experts select vocabularies, and datasets to link to. The ideas presented are relevant to making existing open data more user friendly (and ultimately more usable).