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MapInfo Monday: Precisely Cloud Services

  • 1.  MapInfo Monday: Precisely Cloud Services

    Employee
    Posted 6 days ago

    The classic way of obtaining data is to buy an entire dataset for a country, download the full dataset, and save it on a network drive so that all users can access it.

    A month or three later, you do it all again when a new version of the dataset has been released.

    Wouldn't it be better if you could access the latest data for the area you need when you need it and only pay for the data you use?

    If that sounds compelling, keep on reading.

    Happy #MapInfoMonday!

    Precisely Data Integrity Suite

    At Precisely, we are focused on helping organizations make confident decisions that are based on accurate, consistent, and contextual data. That's why over the recent years, we have been building the Data Integrity Suite, a set of interoperable cloud services that enable your business to build trust in its data.

    The Data Integrity Suite is a SaaS platform made up of several services that can help you:

    • Integrate data from your critical systems into modern data cloud platforms
    • Observe your data as it is moved, to uncover anomalies
    • Govern your assets to accelerate innovation, ensure compliance, and boost operational insights
    •  Detect and fix data quality issues
    • Cleanse, standardize, and verify addresses in your business data
    • Assign addresses hyper-accurate latitude/longitude coordinates and a unique identifier, the PreciselyID
    • Enrich your data with reliable, trustworthy datasets using either the coordinate or the PreciselyID
    • Discover patterns, trends, and relationships between location-based datasets 

    The Data Integrity Suite uses a modular approach. This means that you can use the services that bring value to your organization and ignore the remaining services for now. They may come in handy at a later stage.

    You can find out more about the Data Integrity Suite on the Precisely website.

    Now you may wonder how the Suite can be of interest to you as a MapInfo Pro user. That's a good question. Let's dive into the APIs that we have added support for in MapInfo Pro v23.2 via the Precisely Cloud Services add-in.

    Precisely Spatial Analytics APIs

    The Analysis APIs can be divided into three groups: One for understanding the available datasets, one to perform spatial analysis or operations, and finally one for mapping the datasets via WMS or WMTS. In this article, we will focus on the APIs for spatial operations and mapping.

    The Spatial operations currently supported are:

    • Search Nearby API: Identifies the nearest locations or objects to a specified geometry based on criteria and/or distance. Use case: A retailer searches competitors within a 5 km distance of a potential new site
    • Search At Location API: Enables you to search for locations or points of interest within a defined geographic area or around a specified location. Use case: An electricity company is looking to understand what parcels are within a 250-meter distance of a new power line they are looking to build.
    • Spatial Summary API: Provides detailed spatial data summaries within a specified region, including metrics like population density, area, and aggregated values like sum, average, minimum, and maximum. Use case: A telco company summarizes potential subscribers based on the serviceability of a new fiber optic line coverage.
    • Overlap API: Identifies spatial intersections (overlaps) between a specified geometry and existing geometries in a specified table, like buildings or parcels. Use case: A reinsurer wants to calculate flood risk exposure amounts for all buildings in a new book

    You can find more details about these and other APIs related to these in the Data Integrity Suite Help System.

    In this article, we will not go into details on the Precisely Data Visualizer window, which is part of the Precisely Cloud Services add-in, but that won't stop me from giving you a glimpse at this window. The window is built to help you query Precisely datasets without having access to the full datasets locally.

    Below, you can see an example of how you can use the Precisely Data Visualizer to find, in this case, parcels that are within a 250-meter buffer around the selected power line.

    As mentioned above, the Suite also offers access to some Mapping APIs in the form of OGC WMS and OGC WMTS services.

    The Maps API conforms to the OCG specification for WMS Versions 1.1.1 and 1.3.0 and therefore provides easy integration with any platform that adheres to these Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards.

    It generates map images dynamically based on user-specified parameters such as layers, coordinate systems, and bounding boxes, and so allows you to combine multiple layers into one request.

    The Maps API also supports feature information returning attributes in a variety of output formats, such as text/XML, GML, and application/JSON.

    The Tiles API conforms to the OGC specification for WMTS Version 1.0.0 and provides easy integration with any platform that adheres to this OGC standard.

    It supports both image and vector tile representations of Precisely datasets.

    Below is an example of the tile layers available via the WMTS service.

    Precisely Data Graph API

    The final API we will discuss in this article is the  Precisely Data Graph API. The Data Graph API provides you with a flexible way of accessing connected and linked data. You can control which datasets to query and what attributes to return.

    The Data Graph API is based on the GraphQL™ API, which was created by Facebook around 2012 and open-sourced in 2015. The GraphQL™ API has been adopted by many organizations besides Facebook, such as GitHub, Yelp, and Shopify (see Wikipedia). The GraphQL™ API has since 2018 been supported by the GraphQL Foundation.

    The GraphQL™ API is a data query (and manipulation) language, and so a very good fit for the Precisely data portfolio.

    The Data Graph API allows you to use a single endpoint to access a broad range of data in the Precisely Data Catalog, while returning only the data you specify. Not only can you retrieve data from multiple datasets with one query, but your query can also traverse dataset relationships, so for each record that you retrieve from a dataset, you can also retrieve related data from other datasets.

    An example: You have an address for which you want to understand the related addresses, parcels, buildings, and businesses. You can query the Parcel dataset using the address. And from the found parcel, you can use the relationships to also include records from the Address, Building, and Place datasets.

    As you can see in the image below, the address results in a single parcel match. Using this parcel, we also find one address and one building relating to this parcel. And finally, we found 6 places that relate to the parcel we started with.

    The related datasets use an ID as the link. The relationship between the datasets is not spatial.

    As it is an API, the Data Graph API would benefit from a user interface. So, to make it easier for business users to consume the data from the Data Graph API, we have built an interface for MapInfo Pro users around the API: Precisely Cloud Services add-in.

    Here you can see the interface in MapInfo Pro, allowing you to query the relationship from a specific address.

    Taking Advantage of the Precisely Cloud Services inside MapInfo Pro

    To benefit from the Precisely Cloud Services, you need an account on the Precisely Data Integrity Suite, and you need a subscription for the Spatial API and the Data Graph API Enrichment API.

    If you are interested in trying out these new services, reach out to our Digital Sales Team to request a Trial Suite Workspace. You can use the contact form.

    When you have a Suite account or a trial account, you can use the Precisely Cloud Services add-in to access the services. It comes preinstalled with MapInfo Pro v23.2.

    From the Backstage in MapInfo Pro, you can sign in to the Data Integrity Suite and then start using the WMS and WMTS layers and the Precisely Data Visualizer to query the data.

    More to come on this in a coming article.


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    Peter Horsbøll Møller
    Principal Presales Consultant | Distinguished Engineer
    Precisely | Trust in Data
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