In this session from FOSS4G NA 2025, Annie Cartas from the University of Maryland’s CATT Lab presents Evolving the Trip Analytics Platform. Annie shares the technical journey of modernizing a transportation analysis web application—transitioning from a legacy Leaflet-based system plagued by "fog of war" loading screens to a high-performance stack powered by MapLibre, PostGIS, and vector tiles.
The presentation provides a candid look at how the CATT Lab optimized their geospatial architecture by moving heavy processing from the front-end (Turf.js) to indexed spatial databases, implementing robust three-pronged caching strategies, and leveraging modern open-source tools like deck.gl and PGTILESERVE. Annie also discusses the practical use of AI helpers for PostGIS syntax and MapLibre styling, and the performance benefits of adopting STAC and cloud-native visualization techniques for historical vehicle trip data.
Highlights:
🛰️ Modernizing Transportation Data: How trip analytics helps DOTs explore historical vehicle data to make infrastructure decisions like bridge closures
🔄 Moving Beyond GeoJSON: The transition from sending massive coordinate arrays via websockets to efficient ID-based vector tile serving
🧩 PostGIS Power: Overcoming "SQL fear" to utilize spatial indexes and server-side processing for complex study area intersections
⚙️ PGTILESERVE and Martin: A look at faster developer iteration with automated tile serving and the trade-offs between custom and out-of-the-box servers
🌐 Visualizing Big Data: Using deck.gl and globe views for GPU-based rendering of millions of traffic arcs and H3 global grids
🏢 Caching Strategies: A deep dive into Tanstack Query, NGINX, and Redis for minimizing costly database re-executions
🏗️ AI in GIS: How ChatGPT assisted in writing complex octet-string calculations and navigating the MapLibre style specification
For more content like this check out www.projectgeospatial.com
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