How to motivate someone doing spatial analysis?

Jan Tschada
5 min readOct 23, 2022

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First, we should define what spatial analysis offers for solving spatial-related problems. Explain it the most easy way: With spatial analysis, you can identify patterns by looking at a map. Let’s be honest, that is not the most easy way.

Spatial analysis creates visual aspects and gives a high-level understanding of things being closely related to each other. Not even better.

Using spatial analysis, you can go deeper by exploring locations, properties and relationships. Could be a product offering tag line.

Maybe we need to add some agile and marketing buzzwords to it. Agile spatial analysis improves your actual line of business and offers access to the spatial metaverse. Okay, let's stop here.

Spatial analysis is a craft. Becoming a good spatial analyst requires time, seasoning, curing — it takes a lot of effort, dedication and commitment. If you don't want to invest, you will fiddle around and end up nowhere.

City of Bonn © OpenStreetMap contributors

What actions do you have to take?

By experience, become an expert in your business domain. Having a deep understanding of your domain and the business model your company is supporting enables you to improve the valuable outcome.

Some companies support a lean management approach. Those companies value any workflow, which reduces the costs. Unluckily, this could be the total cost of ownership. In that case, you should not follow a classical build up a dedicated spatial department like most federal entities did with the geospatial agencies in the early days. Lean aware companies value the outcome of highly motivated spatial experts, but do not want to invest in staff members.

Being more efficient in your daily work is always important, especially in the digital age. We want to be more sustainable. Getting more insights with fewer resources. Following the principle of open collaboration, getting access to open data or even better open knowledge. Spatial experts need to create not only spatial data or information, they should provide spatial knowledge.

Do you have access to spatial knowledge supporting your line of business? Maybe you are skeptical if there is a demand for spatial knowledge at all. There is no silver bullet. Invest, get your hands dirty and try to find out for your specific business domain. Make your experiments and proof-of-concepts successful. You need to provide a substantial increase in productivity or at least solve a business problem.

Are you still with us?

You already committed and want to find out what spatial experts can offer to you? At the most rudimentary level, you are lost if you do not know where you are or what is happening around you. Understanding everything about the related locations is the first challenge someone has to master. Spatial experts will always ask you out about the where.

For every related location, spatial experts create models, measure size, shape and distribution of real-world objects. They follow the principle of thematic layers and features representing these objects. A feature describes an object in terms of its geographical representation, using a geometry with information such as area, length, perimeter, height or volume and any other domain specific information needed. So that a feature is the smallest meaningful representation of an object.

Spatial experts need to describe and quantify the relationships among features to determine what is near, what is within, or how something overlaps in space and time. They create space-time cubes and get insights about how locations, events and even actors are related to each other.

Having insights about the internal relationships between locations and actors, spatial experts often need to find the best route to travel or the most suitable location for a new infrastructure.

They offer location-based predictions and try to find spatial patterns in data, such as hot-spots or outliers. Spatial experts need to determine how those spatial patterns change in the future.

Give an approach of spatial problem solving

Inspecting how a spatial expert is solving problems, you identify a common workflow which is very similar to most empirical based approaches. They ask spatial questions being specific to the problem domain and try to find out what kind of spatial information they need.

They explore the ready-to-use, prepare, or gain spatial information by answering the relevant questions. Spatial experts examine the spatial data for quality and completeness. Creating training data, updating and enriching the datasets becoming information rich feature sets is a tedious recurring task.

They have to analyze this spatial ground of truth and often break down the problem into smaller components that can be modeled spatially. Spatial experts need to quantify and evaluate the spatial questions repeatedly.

After obtaining the first results, examine and identify any potential issue based on the spatial questions. Interpreting the results is one of the most underrated tasks.

There is an ongoing repeat and change circle making refinements based on the results. You validate your spatial models against the business domain specific use-cases. Doing so, often additional questions arise.

Show and discuss your results with different skilled stakeholders. Because we are trying to solve spatial related problems, you are using various mapping skills offering a common language and easy-to-understand visualization. But be careful, maps can be misleading and distort the spatial ground truth.

Your spatial analysis results need to empower the business owner to decide and take actions. Otherwise, you will end up like those shiny real-time and big data Kubernetes deployed projects providing no outcome at all — besides lessons learned, we got our hands dirty with this fancy technology stack and burned our IT budget for this year.

Decide on your own

If you are interested in doing spatial analysis, there are so many resources out there. It takes a lot of effort, dedication and commitment, but being a technically skilled human, I don’t think this would stop you. I would love to receive more feedback regarding spatial analysis from the community.

[1] Fight child poverty with demographic analysis
Locate children in poverty using demographic analysis, smart mapping, and a web app.

[2] Map a historic cholera outbreak
Use GIS to learn about a historic example of geographic problem-solving.

[3] Evaluate equitable drinking fountain distribution
Collect drinking fountain locations with ArcGIS Field Maps and analyze their condition.

[4] Perform a site suitability analysis for a new wind farm
Determine the optimal location for a set of new high-efficiency wind turbines in Colorado.

[5] Fight child poverty with demographic analysis
Locate children in poverty using demographic analysis, smart mapping, and a web app.

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