GeoNotebook: An extension to the Jupyter Notebook for exploratory geospatial analysis

Description

Chris Kotfila offers an overview of GeoNotebook, an exciting new extension to Jupyter Notebook that provides interactive visualization and analysis of geospatial data. Unlike other geospatial extensions to the Jupyter Notebook, GeoNotebook includes a fully integrated tile server providing easy visualization of on-disk vector and raster data formats, giving users the ability to zoom and pan through their data, interactively subset that data via points, rectangles and polygons, and interact with those subsets (as NumPy arrays) from inside a notebook.

GeoNotebook is designed to appeal to geospatial experts who are interested in using state-of-the-art data science tools like the Jupyter Notebook to explore their data and share their findings, data scientists who are already using the Python data analytics stack but find current geospatial libraries to be confusing or burdensome, and technical managers of large quantities of geospatial data who are looking to maximize usage by providing secure analysis environments that are closer their data. GeoNotebook achieves this through a server extension that integrates a full open source tiling server into the Jupyter Notebook and by leveraging Jupyter’s comm infrastructure to provide remote synchronization between the Python kernel and a single, large interactive client-side map.

Chris also briefly explores the plugin’s architecture and some NASA climate use cases for which the plugin is being developed and leads a live demonstration of the GeoNotebook plugin’s capabilities.