Bringing scalability to geospatial

GeoWave is a software library that connects the scalability of distributed computing frameworks and key/value stores with modern geospatial software to store, retrieve and analyze massive geospatial datasets.

Install GeoWave |

Get started

Why GeoWave?

GeoWave is an open-source library to store, index, and search multi-dimensional data in sorted key/value stores. It includes implementations that support OGC spatial types (up to 3 dimensions), and both bounded and unbounded temporal values. GeoWave’s geospatial support is built on top of the GeoTools project extensibility model. This means that it can integrate natively with any GeoTools-compatible project, such as GeoServer and UDig, and can ingest GeoTools compatible data sources.

Multi-dimensional Indexing

GeoWave adds multi-dimensional indexing to several key/value data stores, bringing with it support for geographic objects and geospatial operators for efficient querying with spatial and temporal constraints.

Queries & Aggregations

GeoWave efficiently performs spatial and spatial-temporal queries and aggregations by performing fine-grain filtering and processing server-side to reduce the amount of processing required by the client.

Analytics

GeoWave includes several customizable analytic algorithms that operate on geospatial data. It also provides Hadoop input and output formats and Spark RDDs to facilitate new analytic implementations.

Scalable Design

GeoWave utilizes distributed computing clusters and server-side fine grain filtering to perform time and/or location specific queries on datasets containing billions of features with 100% accuracy.

Pluggable Backend

GeoWave is an indexing layer that can be added on top of any sorted key/value store. All core logic is abstracted away from the backend implementation to make supporting new key/value stores as simple as possible.

Modular Framework

The GeoWave architecture is designed to be extremely extensible with most of the functionality units defined by interfaces that enable easy feature extension and platform integration.

Learn More

GeoWave in Action

Take a look and see how GeoWave can be used on real data sets. You can also check out the GeoWave Overview for more information about these and other examples.

GeoLife at City Scale

This image displays the results of a GeoWave kernel density estimate (KDE) analytic that was performed on GeoLife GPS data. The data was rendered at a Mapbox zoom level of 13.
GeoLife at House Scale

This image displays the results of a GeoWave kernel density estimate (KDE) analytic that was performed on GeoLife GPS data. The data was rendered at a Mapbox zoom level of 15.
OpenStreetMap GPX at Continent Scale

This image displays raw OpenStreetMap GPX data in a GeoWave data store. The data was rendered at a Mapbox zoom level of 6.
OpenStreetMap GPX at World Scale

This image displays the results of a GeoWave kernel density estimate (KDE) analytic that was performed OpenStreetMap GPX data. The data was rendered at a Mapbox zoom level of 3.
T-Drive at City Scale

This image displays the results of a GeoWave kernel density estimate (KDE) analytic that was performed on T-Drive GPS data. The data was rendered at a Mapbox zoom level of 12.