Cascading Workflow for Spatial Binning of BigData
I just finished a 3 day training on Cascading by Concurrent and it was worth every minute. I always knew about Cascading, but never invested in it but I wish I had, specially last month when I was doing a BigData ETL job in MapReduce. My development time would have been significantly reduced (pun intended :-) if I thought of the problem in terms of a cascading water flow rather than in MapReduce.
So in Cascading, you compose a data flow with set of pipes having operations such as filtering, joining and grouping and it turns that flow into a MapReduce job that you can execute on a Hadoop cluster.
Being spatially aware, I _had_ to add a spatial function to Cascading using our GIS Tools For Hadoop geometry API. The spatial function that I decided to implement bins location data in the same area, in such that at the end of the process, each area has a count of the locations that is covers. This is a nice way to visualize massive data.
So, we start with:
to produce:
Again, rather than thinking in MapReduce, think data water flow:
Here, I have an input tap that accepts text data from HDFS. Each text record is composed of fields separated by a tab character. In Cascading, a tap can define the field names and types. A pipe is created to select the “X” and “Y” fields to be processed by a function. This is a spatial function that utilizes the Esri Geometry API. It loads into an in-memory spatial index a set of polygons defined as an property value, and will be used to perform a point-in-polygon operation on each input X/Y tuple. The overlapping polygon identifier is emitted as the pipe output. The output polygon identifiers are grouped together and counted by yet another pipe. The tuple set of polygon identifier/count is written to a comma separated HDFS based file using an output tap. The count field is labeled as POPULATION to make it ArcGIS friendly :-)
Like usual, all the source code can be found here.
So in Cascading, you compose a data flow with set of pipes having operations such as filtering, joining and grouping and it turns that flow into a MapReduce job that you can execute on a Hadoop cluster.
Being spatially aware, I _had_ to add a spatial function to Cascading using our GIS Tools For Hadoop geometry API. The spatial function that I decided to implement bins location data in the same area, in such that at the end of the process, each area has a count of the locations that is covers. This is a nice way to visualize massive data.
So, we start with:
to produce:
Again, rather than thinking in MapReduce, think data water flow:
Here, I have an input tap that accepts text data from HDFS. Each text record is composed of fields separated by a tab character. In Cascading, a tap can define the field names and types. A pipe is created to select the “X” and “Y” fields to be processed by a function. This is a spatial function that utilizes the Esri Geometry API. It loads into an in-memory spatial index a set of polygons defined as an property value, and will be used to perform a point-in-polygon operation on each input X/Y tuple. The overlapping polygon identifier is emitted as the pipe output. The output polygon identifiers are grouped together and counted by yet another pipe. The tuple set of polygon identifier/count is written to a comma separated HDFS based file using an output tap. The count field is labeled as POPULATION to make it ArcGIS friendly :-)
Like usual, all the source code can be found here.
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