How does Spatial Analysis Work?
Spatial analysis is the process of using analytical tools to analyze and represent data, relationships, and patterns among various geospatial data. This task of analyzing and recognizing patterns is discussed as follows.
1. Data Collection
The collection of data is the first step in spatial analysis. It uses varied ways to gather information from the sources. Data can be collected using remote sensing devices like LiDAR and airborne systems, field surveys by on-ground observations and measurements, open source datasets, etc.
Data acquired is then formatted and converted into a uniform format that can be used for further processing.
2. Data Analysis
This is the second step and is used to gain insightful information from the data collected and prepared. This can be done by employing various analysis models like the distance and proximity model that uses the distance between two points and proximity between two attributes to develop a relationship between data, spatial overlay where multiple data sets are layered together to recognize patterns, statistics which recognizes clusters that helps understand the distribution of the attributes. All this analysis can be easily done using AI and ML models where the models can be trained on multiple and varied data sets to increase accuracy.
3. Data Presentation
After the analysis of the data, it is important to present the results. This can be done in the form of graphs, charts, maps, tables, and various visualization tools. 2D can also get a better perspective using 3D visualization tools which add a variable to 2D data to make it 3D and hence more presentable.
What Is Spatial Analysis, and How Does It Work
Have you ever wondered how city planners come up with decisions like what is the best location for a school, hospital, or park? How did during the COVID outbreak the spread of the virus was recorded and monitored to effectively alienate affected areas to decrease the spread? How vaccination strategies are made for various diseases and monitored to ensure an equal distribution. How are such accurate maps created? How does our GPS know all the high-traffic routes in the area and help find the shortest and fastest route?
It can all be done using spatial data and spatial analysis. Spatial analysis involves understanding patterns and relationships based on spatial data. In this article, we will discuss what is spatial analysis and how it works.