Javier de la Torre (CARTO)
Demand for working with geospatial data and demographics in the private and public sector is growing exponentially, and there are not enough spatial experts available to meet this demand. The industry now needs to educate a new generation of experts and increase the productivity of existing specialists. At CARTO we are working on an open-source library called CARTOframes to simplify access to data, transformations, clean up, modeling and reporting, and we’ve seen strong results to simplify processes and save time in performing spatial operations in a wide range of verticals. Another part of our architecture to simplify spatial data science is the CARTO Data Observatory where we’re aggregating data (both open and commercial) from many sources around the world, including demographics, expenditure data, human mobility and much more. We provide this data to our users in a raw format and transform this into a common support geography which we call the CARTOgrid. We automatically perform downscaling and upscaling on the grid to provide a common data structure. This has proven to be very effective in reducing the time it takes to introduce new features for spatial models. In this talk, Javier will discuss the overall architecture of a modern platform for spatial data science and how that is connected live to data sources – opening our field to an entire new audience.