2025 FOSS4G NA | Evolving the Trip Analytics Platform - Annie Cartas
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
#TransportationAnalytics #FOSS4G #PostGIS #MapLibre #Geospatial #GIS #VectorTiles #OpenSource #DataVisualization #ProjectGeospatial #TechMigration #BigData #SmartCities #SQL #UrbanPlanning
