GeoHexViz: A Python package for the visualizing hexagonally binned geospatial data
Tony M. Abou Zeidan, Mark Rempel · The Journal of Open Source Software · 2023
Geospatial visualization is often used in military operations research to convey analyses to both analysts and decision makers.For example, it has been used to help commanders coordinate units within a geographic region (Feibush et al., 2000), to depict how terrain impacts vehicle performance (Laskey et al., 2010), and inform training decisions in order to meet mission requirements (Goodrich et al., 2019).When such analyses include a large amount of point-like data, combining geospatial visualization and binning -in particular, hexagonal binning given its properties such as having the same number of neighbours as sides, the centre of each hexagon being equidistant from the centres of its neighbours, and that hexagons tile densely on curved surfaces (Carr et al., 1992;Sinha, 2019) -is an effective way to summarize and communicate the data.Recent examples in the military and public safety domains include assessing the impact of infrastructure on Arctic operations (Hunter et al., 2021) and communicating the spatial distribution of COVID-19 cases (Shaito & Elmasri, 2021) respectively.However, creating such visualizations may be difficult for many since it requires in-depth knowledge of both Geographic Information Systems and analytical techniques, not to mention access to software that may require a paid license, training, and in some cases knowledge of a programming language such as Python or JavaScript.To help reduce these barriers, GeoHexViz -which produces publication-quality geospatial visualizations with hexagonal binning -is a Python package that provides a simple interface, requires minimal in-depth knowledge, and either limited or no programming.The result is an analyst being able to spend more time doing analysis and less time producing visualizations.