Every day sensors, satellites and social media generate quintillions of bytes and a large portion of the data is location aware. The geographical perspective is especially important with Big Data as it allows us to derive new insights and explanations often unrecognized without a spatial eye: to see the unseen. This trend enables our European open communities to go beyond traditional mapping and grow into the realm of IoT, LiDAR, Smart Cities and the Connected Car.

However, Big Spatial Data technology based on geospatial attributes for the Cloud is relatively new to the developer community and organisational ecosystem. To find the latest proven software one has to look across the Atlantic Ocean, where a suite of specialised open spatial solutions is emerging. For us in Europe this creates opportunities to innovate traditional mapping services into higher value added business information provision.

Meet the innovative projects from across The Big Pond such as GeoGig (versioning/data history), GeoMesa (database) and GeoWave (distributed storage). Building upon Hadoop, Spark and Cassandra we are able to integrate the latest technology for robust and affordable geospatial solutions, to deploy Big Spatial Data answers to Big Data challenges. Use cases involve improving situational understanding, real time monitoring, better decision-making and actionable intelligence.

No need for us to re-invent the wheel, when adoption of this cutting edge technology and to build upon it will be key to keep us abreast of European Big Data developments.