Location technology platform, Foursquare introduced the next-gen tiling system, “Hex Tiles” which enhances the speed and efficiency of geo-spatial data analytics and helps in business decision making.
Foursquare’s Unfolded Platform for geospatial data unification, enrichment, visualization, and analytics is now offering Hex Tiles exclusively to customers and partners. Foursquare clients may access, blend, and analyze geographical data in nearly any area using the integrated technology of Unfolded.
“We developed Hex Tiles to tackle the challenges data scientists face in dealing with geospatial data.” Sina Kashuk, SVP of Unfolded at Foursquare, said. “With Hex Tiles, data scientists can easily bring their data together, enrich it with third party datasets, perform exploratory analyses and quickly share their results. Also, because it is able to encode the time dimension, the system addresses the complexities of working with spatiotemporal data.”
The major challenge of data unification can be solved using Hex Tiles. The diverse spatial datasets can be consumed and transformed into Hex Tiles simply and quickly. The process helps in providing better efficiency along with making data unification simpler and delivers opportunities for data enhancement. To have a better understanding, users may merge several datasets, such as demographic data, environmental measurements, points of interest (POI), and movement data.
Hex Tiles is a tiling solution for analytics that allows users to prepare and work with huge, divergent information in one place. Hex Tiles additionally include a one-of-a-kind spatiotemporal analytics tile format for encoding data that is more efficient than vector tiles.
Users can work in an area of interest on a map regardless of data size using Hex Tiles, which is developed using an open-source, hierarchical, discrete global grid system that breaks up the world into hexagonal cells named H3. The technology, which can handle hundreds of millions of rows of data simultaneously, allows users to analyze and discover massive datasets in their own browser using the Unfolded Platform.
“This is an exciting new technology milestone for us at Foursquare and the beginning of substantial investments we are making to drive innovation in the geospatial analytics and visualization space. Hex Tiles is a game-changer for data scientists and companies who need to conduct large-scale data analyses for site selection, competitive research and planning, and other forms of business intelligence,” said Gary Little, CEO of Foursquare. “The potential use cases for this technology are boundless.”
