
Urban Data Analytics: (3) Analytics and Visualization
1. Introduction Many of the social and environmental phenomena have spatial characteristics. Geo-spatial methods, such as, maps, GIS, and etc, are excellent ways to visualize and understand these characteristics. In this post, I will introduce some of the urban analytics and geospatial modelling techniques that I use frequently. For visualization of spatial data, I frequently use Leaflet.js. It is a javascript-based web mapping engine that allows for creating a web map with a

Urban Data Analytics: (2) Data storage and processing
1. Introduction Needless to say, big data is “big” in size. So there comes the challenge in storing and processing the data. Often times, you don’t need to worry about data storage because, in many cases you are just given a dataset to work on your hard drive or a server somewhere. If you are involved in data collection aspect of big data, however, you will need to consider where and how to store the data. It varies with industry, but when we talk about big data in today’s te

Urban Data Analytics: (1) Introduction
1. Introduction Big data is such a buzz word that everyone is talking about it, and yet no one knows what it actually means and how we, normal citizens, can leverage the power of big data to our advantage. This post is intended to help a layperson, especially those in the government and non-profit sectors who have little knowledge and experience in programming, to unleash the power of big data and to incorporate big data analysis into their daily job using publicly available