How to use GeoCommons Analysis

Yesterday we announced that we were making Analysis functions available or everyone on the GeoIQ community site, GeoCommons. As Sean pointed out, this is a revolution in opening access to the tools for anyone to ask their own questions of data without requiring desktop tools or long-training. It’s our hope that through open analysis the community and world can find interesting and novel insights into complex problems and share these with the world.

I wanted to discuss some of the specific functionality that we’ve added to make Analysis easy to use and we’d love to hear your feedback and analysis ideas as well. We’re just getting started!

Data Analysis

There are two ways to get to Analysis – when viewing any dataset, such as UNEP, Trade in Electric Current – Exports, Global, 1988 – 2004, there is a new button available as a primary action: “Analyze Data”. Clicking this will open our Analysis brewer that lets you choose from the current library of analysis modules.

Choosing any of these will open the specific steps and guidelines for running the analysis – such as additional datasets you may need to select in case of comparing a correlation between datasets, or attributes within a dataset. For example, with the UNEP Trade in Electric Current Exports we could calculate the difference by country in exports from 1988 to 2004.

.

After clicking “Create”, GeoCommons will take your analysis request and send it off to our cloud of analysis worker computers to calculate the data. If you wait a few seconds, you’ll be taken to the resulting dataset page to edit the title and other information, but if you want to move on you can just be notified when it’s done by the new messages in the top of the page. Clicking on a message will take you to the dataset and then you can do whatever you want with the analysis output – view the data, filter it, download, or map it!

In-Map Analysis

The regular steps for data above is very straight-forward, but takes you out of the flow if you’re in the process of actually building a map. So we’ve added what we call “in-map analysis”. When you’re making a map, you can “Add Data” via our public catalog of tens of thousands of datasets. You’ll notice a new button there next to Details and Add to Map called “Analyze”. Clicking on this will open the same Analysis brewer. After you’re finished creating the analysis, the result will be automatically added to your map – although a message box will let you know that it is currently being processed. Once it’s done, it will automatically be added to the map for you and let you style away!

You can also quickly analyze any dataset in your map in Edit mode by clicking on the layer and choosing “Analyze” from the menu.

Let us know

Hopefully this helps in pointing out just some of the ways we’re making analysis as easy as data sharing and visualization. We’re still adding more features and are excited for your feedback to make it both easier and more powerful for you. Please share your ideas here or on our community forums.