On the 6th Day of Analytics – My true love Filtered by Distance

Today we’re going to have some fun, okay, fun in the geeky GIS analyst kind of way (the only kind I know!). Nevertheless, if you follow this blog…then…well you know what I mean.

Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane. Remember when you all were kids, still learning how to become the best geo-spatial superstar you could be? Okay, so you may or may not remember this introduction to GIS:

Wasn’t that fun? Grover just explained the essence of the analytical tool that I’m going to introduce to you today: Filter by Distance, or rather, understanding things that are neeeaaaar vs. things that are faaaaaar.

So now we’re back in the present day and all of the geospatial rockstars have a deep understanding of complex geospatial operations and processes for gaining a really deep understanding of geospatial problems. This is great! We can continue to look to the very few true geospatial rockstars within our organizations to shed this very important understanding upon us, or, for those of us that know that meaning and understanding are really not that hard to achieve if only we had access to readily available and easy-to-use tools! Until now we could only imagine such a wonderful world where we could do this analysis ourselves.

Enter the GeoCommons analytics here to provide easy access to vast amounts of rich geographic meaning to the masses! Now let’s explore…

The Question:

Which Baseball stadiums in the US are within 1 mile of Football Stadiums?

Okay so this question might not be all that informative or even that interesting, but it conveys the general idea of what we’re trying to accomplish here: How do we derive deeper meaning from disparate data?

A glimpse at the “Filter by Distance” tool:

And the result:

A map of MLB stadiums within 1 mile of NFL stadiums in the US

It turns out there are 10 Major League Baseball stadiums in US that are within one mile of an NFL stadium. Good to know, eh?

The Conclusion:

To “filter by distance” means to filter the features of one dataset that are within a distance of another dataset’s features. This is essentially a combination of the buffer and the intersection analysis tools. As the “12 days of Analytics” continues we hope that you let us your thoughts on what would be useful for you and geospatial analysis needs.