Since 2018 GA-CCRi has partnered with the United Nations (UN) community to deliver a collaborative research platform that leverages the Optix platform and data from the maritime and air domains. Optix is a collection of technologies that provide real-time ingest, persistence, visualization and analysis of millions of daily records. The UN uses this platform for collaboration across more than 30 countries to build national statistics, key economic indicators, and to support its mission of international peace and security.
The Problem
As big data has become mainstream, the UN community sought to take advantage of many trade related datasets to begin to create forecasting and nowcasting methodologies for official statistics. The UN needed a platform that was flexible enough to ingest data from multiple sources and present it in a performant and resilient way to scientists and statisticians around the world. The platform needed to be open by design, to enable collaboration and give the UN community flexibility to expand capacity and operability with more users and data.
Our approach
With the third UN World Data Forum just weeks away, GA-CCRi partnered with the UN to deploy a platform to support ingest of two data sources: Automatic Identification System (AIS) data and Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADSB) data. These sources are used for safety and collision avoidance by maritime and air vessels. GA-CCRi used our Optix Platform to ingest these sources, creating a live and historical view of the data. This data was viewable using Optix Viz (interface pictured below) and available in a notebook environment, for deeper exploration.
Behind the Scenes
Collaborators from all over the world have used the platform for research into the common good. GA-CCRi is proud to partner with international researchers with goals around trade, tourism and improving the environment. To learn more about the initiatives by the UN check out the Big Data UN Working Group.
Results
The results are terrific. Within a few months, the platform was in use for building global trade and economic indicators. Today, it supports researchers from 30+ countries all over the world. Several national statistical offices have begun using the platform to build analysis on economic activities to support monitoring/growth of trade.
Analysts, scientists and statisticians have access to the platform through the Optix Viz web client. Based on GA-CCRi’s Stealth framework and other Open Source technology, Optix Viz presents the analyst with a highly performant user experience. Analysts can use tools like time-lapse analysis to recreate events and 1D and 2D histograms to detect patterns in metadata.
Building a collaboration platform for analytics?
