Development Platform for Geospatial Services and Big Data

Business challenge

Our client, the world’s leading innovator in the field of location-based services, is sparking the next generation of geodata-centric solutions and services for autonomous driving. Intellias became a technology partner in the development of our client’s global infrastructure in 2015, when we were engaged in the ground-up development of a suite of automotive navigation solutions for the premium car segment. To shape the future of smart city, autonomous vehicle, and logistics solutions, our client decided to develop a platform for creating and sharing geospatial big data products and services powered by a variety of data sources.

As a proven development partner, our team was entrusted to launch the development of an innovative high-definition maps and cloud data platform that would be a one-stop shop for exchanging geospatial big data.

Solution delivered

So that our client could share access to standardized geospatial big data and services from trusted providers at a global scale, our team of dedicated software development, quality assurance, and DevOps professionals helped implement a bespoke collaborative platform for big data and the development of location-centric solutions as well as a marketplace for simple data exchange.

We took on the challenge of transferring our client’s automotive navigation solution into a well-documented SDK and APIs that would allow our client to boost the development of innovative location-centric platform services across industries. Accompanied by a single marketplace for geospatial data services, this product became a central hub for interactions between automotive service providers and their customers.

Source map compilation based on large quantities of geospatial big data

Our engineers handle massive datasets from a variety of sources to compile and update data optimized for rendering map vector tiles. Featuring worldwide coverage, versioning, rich attributes, and consistency, the output is widely used as the main source of geospatial big data by multiple parts of the platform such as the SDK, data libraries, and client portal. For web-based maps, we use a customized format that is effectively tooled for rendering vector data.

Development of data-intensive libraries

Within the SDK, we’ve developed and continue to support a set of data processing libraries that allow third-party engineering teams to process rich static and dynamic datasets on cities, traffic, and weather within pipelines.

One of our challenges was to optimize the performance and throughput of the AWS-based library by analyzing and deleting unused storage volumes and old snapshots. Our enhancements have not only optimized storage space usage, data administration, and performance but also considerably reduced our client’s AWS costs.

Performing operations on large volumes of data

To ensure robust scalability and performance for end customers, we launched a tool that enables third-party engineering and data analysis teams to create custom pipelines for processing large volumes of data, including versioned data like maps and dynamic data received from vehicle sensors. Access to various data types is provided through batch and stream processing tools implemented with the Apache Spark and Apache Flink frameworks respectively.

To create more value for data analysts, who are a significant part of our client’s target audience, we complemented the solution with the possibility to run SQL queries, simplifying data analysis and validation.

Implementing a hyper-growth hub of geospatial data services

The current version of our client’s solution aims to bring all geospatial services and data on offer into one B2B marketplace. Introduced two years ago, this marketplace is intended to expand opportunities for securely enriching data and transferring it among enterprises across industries. It organizes big data and makes it findable and accessible through cloud-based infrastructure solutions.

The marketplace we developed totally transformed the way our client does business online. By demonstrating value for both service providers and their consumers, it reached new businesses that are building the future of an autonomous world.

End-to-end testing

In addition to swiftly scaling the development capacity of our client’s team, we took on the challenge of establishing an efficient end-to-end (E2E) testing process that ensures the ongoing delivery of the highest quality mapping products. The goal of our E2E testing team is to understand and reproduce client-centric scenarios rather than only focus on functional testing.

Business outcome

In two short years, we’ve grown our partnership with this client by 30% and have delivered a platform that accelerates data-driven innovation. Developed in synergy with Intellias engineering professionals, who deliver excellence in data processing, storage, geospatial big data analytics and visualization, our client’s solution not only influences the way end customers can ingest, process, and analyze geospatial data but more importantly enables secure data enrichment and data transfer for enterprises across industries.

Partnering with Intellias has given our client access to technical expertise and the ability to respond to increasing demand by geospatial data services providers and their customers for a single development platform and data marketplace. For the first time, the automotive industry has received a complex automatic platform tool that can be used by third-party developers, data analysts, and data engineers to process, enrich, and share geospatial data.

Engineering excellence in the automotive industry and expertise in big data technologies allowed us to reduce the time to market and resulted in our client offering best-of-breed deliverables that have attracted new customers.