In analytics projects that seek to answer complex real-world questions such as how to reduce a farm’s water usage, researchers must typically collect data from multiple sources over an extended period of time. IBM Corp. today unveiled an experimental new service aimed at making it easier to put the different pieces together.

The offering, which is debuting under the name PAIRS Geoscope, is specifically built to process what the company refers to as geospatial-temporal data.

This is information that describes how physical objects change over time in the context of their location, an essential asset for many important industries. A utility planning to build a new solar farm, for example, must carefully weigh the target location’s average temperature and cloud coverage before construction can begin. Likewise, tech-savvy agriculture companies monitor field conditions with sensors to identify ways of improving crop growth.

In fact, IBM researcher Hendrik Hamann wrote in a blog post that the whole idea behind PAIRS Geoscope came from a crop analytics system the company had implemented for a California winery a few years ago. The new service aims to address two of the biggest challenges that tend to get in the way of such projects.

The first is the difficulty of moving large volumes of sensory information from a remote location to a data center where they can be analyzed. To reduce data collection requirements, PAIRS Geoscope has a repository of readily available geospatial-temporal records for analysts to draw upon. IBM says that it’s adding “terabytes” of new information every day.

The other challenge has to do with the fact that data points collected from different sources will often have varying formats. The more formats there are to reconcile, the more complexity there is to deal with. IBM says PAIRS Geoscope can automatically ingest new measurements and integrate them into a consistent form so they may be processed as a whole. 

The platform enables users to carry out analysis in a graphical console that overlays findings on a map for easy viewing. According to IBM, there’s also a programming interface for integrating PAIRS Geoscope into external applications.

Several companies and academic institutions have already started using the service. One of them is IHI Corp., a Japanese heavy-equipment manufacturer that’s using PAIRS Geoscope as part of a weather forecasting project. The firm hopes to develop a system that can make predictions upwards of 30 days into the future with 30 percent higher accuracy than current techniques.

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