"I know it has been tough since Willard left, but I have some good news; we will be getting you some help." These words are coming to you accompanied by a concerned, paternal look from the Vice President of Connected Product Development, who is standing in your cubicle.

Willard was your boss, now your former boss. He left recently to join another company as Head of their IoT division. They were highly impressed with his accomplishments building up a cloud-based IoT analytics capability, which was all your idea, of course, but c'est la vie.

Now, with your boss gone, the VP and other executives are worried about the momentum stalling. You are a little bit miffed at this since you had to twist your boss's arm to get him to go along with everything in the first place. Look on the bright side, you tell yourself, at least you are getting some help.

He continues, "We want to up the ante, none of the competition is aggregating their thermostat data and selling it to power companies. Maybe the new guy can figure out how to do that."

Ha, the new guy. "I got this, I developed what we have so far. I can certainly handle this," you state confidently, holding his gaze. "I've been looking for an excuse to do a little geospatial anyway."

You feel capable now; it is time they started giving you some credit. But you are not quite sure how to do it, as it seems a little daunting. The power companies are going to have service areas that do not stick to state boundaries or zip codes. You will need to somehow draw the service areas on a map and then find the devices in the area. This sounds like a lot of manual work.

"Well, we will see. I have lots of ideas if you can pull this one off," he replies. With this, he turns around and strolls assuredly down the hallway on his way to the next meeting. You hesitate for a second wondering if he knew all along that you were the brains behind the IoT analytics and just manipulated you into putting all your energy into his project. Then you shake your head thinking surely not, and get back to work.

This chapter is about leveraging the field of geospatial analysis to enhance IoT analytics. IoT devices are sometimes attached to equipment that moves around geographically. Even if this is not the case, devices will probably have diverse geographic locations when deployed. This creates an opportunity to find patterns and develop valuable services by using location based analysis. We will introduce some key concepts and technology for geospatial analytics.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• The benefit of geospatial analytics for IoT
• Geospatial analytics basics:
  • Welcome to Null Island
  • Coordinate Reference Systems
  • Python for geospatial analysis
• Vector-based methods:
  • A bounding box
  • Contains
  • Buffers
  • Simplify
  • The vector summary
• Raster-based methods
• Storing geospatial data:
  • File formats
  • Spatial extensions for relational databases
  • Geospatial data in HDFS
  • Spatial indexing
• Processing geospatial data:
  • Geospatial analysis software:
    • ArcGIS
    • QGIS
    • ogr2ogr
  • PostGIS spatial functions
  • Geospatial and big data
• Solving the pollution reporting problem