GeoDa web: enhancing web-based mapping with spatial analytics

Cloud mapping platforms, such as Google Maps, CartoDB, MapZen, and the like have become powerful alternatives to traditional desktop-based mapping and GIS applications. However, unlike their desktop counterparts, web mapping platforms typically do not contain any but the most basic spatial analytical functionality. In this paper, we introduce GeoDa-Web, a cloud mapping platform that integrates spatial analytics and web mapping. The platform enables researchers to retrieve spatial data from the cloud, conduct spatial analysis in the cloud, visualize results using cloud mapping, and publish maps and plots to social media in a user-friendly way. It leverages the code base from the widely used GeoDa desktop software for spatial data exploration and the PySAL Python library of spatial analytical functions. We outline the architecture, discuss the implementation and illustrate the functionality of GeoDa-Web.