Search, Isochrones, and Spatial Lookup
By: Chris Toomey
From the early days of Alteryx, location data and geospatial analysis have always been front and center, and we are excited to be part of the Alter Everything movement.
Today Mapbox is announcing a public beta for three new Alteryx Modules: Search, Isochrones, and Spatial Lookup (powered by Mapbox Boundaries). All three modules leverage our world-scale APIs, so once they are in your workflow, you have global, accurate datasets at your fingertips.
Here’s a bit more detail about each module:
Search
The Search module will transform your structured data into usable location data. If that sounds like geocoding — it is!
What kind of data can you search for?
- Countries: Generally recognized countries, or administrative entities with a designated country code under ISO 3166–1 (that’s a fancy way of saying — if you think it’s a country, it probably is).
- Regions: Top-level administrative areas like states in the USA or provinces in Canada or China.
- Postcodes: Postal codes used in country-specific national addressing systems (your results should be normalized to the country in which you query.)
- Places: Cities, villages, and municipalities.
- Addresses: Individual residential or business addresses.
When you run the Search module, you will get the coordinates themselves as longitude and latitude columns as well as an Alteryx-encoded point. If the module returns no data, you will also get the list of all data that couldn’t be found (in case you want to clean it up and try again). You will also get additional metadata about your results, including a reference to the place type, the relevance of our result to your specific query, and a qualitative accuracy metric for the data.
We have hardcoded a rate-limit to ensure your results always process, but if you find yourself in need of more speed…we can do that 😉.
Isochrones
Isochrones should be very familiar to Alteryx users — you know them well as the drive-time trade area. Simply put — an isochrone helps you answer, for a specific travel modality, “how far can I get in N minutes?”
Here’s a real-world example from my teammate, John Branigan. It’s called “Meet me in the middle” and it helps two people identify the best meeting points within a 10 or 20-minute walk or bike ride from both of them.
With the Isochrones module, we’re bringing not only the driving modality but also walking and cycling. All you have to do is pick your method and how many rings you want (up to a maximum of 60 minutes), and we’ll give you back the shapes for you to analyze — whether it’s for site selection or simply the best place to meet your friends.
Because this is built on Mapbox’s live global road network and routing engine, we can generate isochrones anywhere in the world and they’ll always reflect the actual state of roads in the world.
Spatial Lookup
Spatial Lookup module answers a slightly different question than the other two. It allows you to do the equivalent of spin the globe and ask, “What is here?”
If we repeat Bill Nye’s process at scale, you get this:
What is going on here? It may not be immediately noticeable from that data table, but what this module is doing is actually extracting data from the map itself by integrating a unique dataset — Mapbox Boundaries.
Mapbox Boundaries’ rich and detailed data is curated and available for every country in the world — from the country level down to detailed postcodes and statistical areas. When you query one of those layers, Spatial Lookup will not only tell you where your data is in the world, but we’ll also give you data about all of the layers above your data, so you can create detailed and drillable visualizations like this one. Spatial Lookup literally makes the world queryable.
Get access
Everyone at Mapbox is excited to join the Alteryx community and achieve the mission of Altering Everything. Maps and these modules are just the beginning! We can’t wait to see what you build and hear how we can help.
To get you started, reach out to our team to request access to the Beta. The first 100 people will get a coupon for 1 week of free geocoder usage to test things out.
Mapbox modules for Alteryx was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.