Accelerating Geospatial Computing in R and Python Using Apache Arrow

Speakers: Dewey Dunnington, Senior R Developer at Voltron Data and Joris Van den Bossche, Software Engineer at Voltron Data

The Apache Arrow and Apache Parquet ecosystems provide a flexible and efficient in-memory and on-disk format for tabular data. With implementations in most languages, Apache Arrow supports a growing set of tools and analytical workflows. In this talk, Dewey and Joris introduce a geospatial extension to the Parquet file format (GeoParquet) and a geospatial extension to the Arrow columnar format (GeoArrow). Collectively, they demonstrate the potential for faster, more composable, and more efficient geospatial workflows leveraging Arrow-based formats and tools.