Bridging open source tools and Geoportals for interactive spatial data analytics

Geoportals have been the primary source of spatial information to researchers in diverse fields. Recent years have seen a growing trend to integrate spatial analysis and geovisual analytics inside Geoportals. Researchers could use the Geoportal to conduct basic analysis without offline processing. In practice, domain-specific analysis often requires researchers to integrate heterogeneous data sources, leverage new statistical models, or build their own customized models. These tasks are increasingly being tackled with open source tools in programming languages such as Python or R. However, it is unrealistic to incorporate the numerous open source tools in a Geoportal platform for data processing and analysis. This work provides an exploratory effort to bridge Geoportals and open source tools through Python scripting. The Geoportal demonstrated in this work is the Urban and Regional Explorer for China studies. A python package is provided to manipulate this platform in the local programming environment. The server side of the Geoportal implements a set of service endpoints that allows the package to upload, transform, and process user data and seamlessly integrate them into the existing datasets. A case study is provided that illustrated the use of this package to conduct integrated analyses of search engine data and baseline census data. This work attempts a new direction in Geoportal development, which could further promote the transformation of Geoportals into online analytical workbenches.