Pigeon: A spatial MapReduce language

Abstract

With the huge amounts of spatial data collected everyday, MapReduce frameworks, such as Hadoop, have become a common choice to analyze big spatial data for scientists and people from industry. Users prefer to use high level languages, such as Pig Latin, to deal with Hadoop for simplicity. Unfortunately, these languages are designed for primitive non-spatial data and have no support for spatial data types or functions. This demonstration presents Pigeon, a spatial extension to Pig which provides spatial functionality in Pig. Pigeon is implemented through user defined functions (UDFs) making it easy to use and compatible with all recent versions of Pig. This also allows it to integrate smoothly with existing non-spatial functions and operations such as Filter, Join and Group By. Pigeon is compatible with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard which makes it easy to learn and use for users who are familiar with existing OGC-compliant tools such as PostGIS. This demonstrations shows to audience how to work with Pigeon through some interesting applications running on large scale real datasets extracted from OpenStreetMap.