Location based data is a key element of the Internet. Initially, people were thrilled to have maps from companies like Mapquest back in the 90's, data visualization has advanced. SpatialKey represents the next iteration of geo-spatial data visualization on the Internet.

Today, SpatialKey announced a private beta. The SpatialKey team has been hard at work since InsideRIA first announced the technical preview on August 9th. This new version includes many new features and some advanced visualizations. This release demonstrates why SpatialKey is one of the most exciting RIA's I have seen recently.

Overview

What is SpatialKey? SpatialKey is a web application built in Flex that provides a platform for visualizing data that has geographical context. The site defines it as follows:

SpatialKey is designed to help organizations quickly assess location based information critical to their organizational goals, decision making processes and reporting requirements.

This isn't the first time we have mentioned SpatialKey on InsideRIA, but SpatialKey has changed a great deal since the initial preview release that I highlighted. The initial version provided a selection of data sets that you could view. This version allows you, the user, to submit your own data sets for visualization. That means you can take most any data set that includes geographic information and output it as a CSV, upload it into SpatialKey, and setup reports to view your data. There isn't another web application that offers this type of functionality.

As a part of the release, the SpatialKey team has released a video detailing the updated features and giving an overview of the application.

Visualizations in SpatialKey

In addition, the SpatialKey sites provides many videos illustrating the functionality. Here is a video demonstrating some of the visualizations.

Architecture and Deployment

In my talks with the SpatialKey team, I learned a great deal about how the application is architected. The frontend is a Flex application, and the backend is deployed on Amazon EC2 and integrates with BlazeDS, Spring, and Hibernate. The team emphasized that the platform has been built to be extremely scalable, and it is able to support many different uses.

Previously I asked the team if SpatialKey would be open for deploying behind the firewall. There weren't any plans for that with the technical preview release, but the SpatialKey team has announced that there will be options for enterprise deployment behind the firewall as well as the ability to embed reports within websites.

The Future for SpatialKey

Currently, SpatialKey is just available to private beta testers, but in the future SpatialKey will be made available in a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. While no specific pricing has been announced, the price will be based on factors such as volumes of data.

Private Beta Access

We have a limited number of access codes for the private beta that have been reserved for InsideRIA readers. We will give these out in a first come - first serve basis. Leave a comment (remember to include a valid email in the email field - this will not be shown to viewers of this site). Remember it is first come - first serve.