GeoWave/GeoMesa comparative analysis

Description of work

A frequently asked question in the geo big data community is: what is the differences between GeoWave and GeoMesa? A deep understanding of this question will take a focused comparative analysis of the two projects, and that is what this initiative intends to do.

The plan of attack for this comparative analysis is as follows:

• Read through the documentation and source code of each project, in order to clearly map out the feature set and approaches of the projects.
• Develop a set of performance test cases that map to real world use cases, and perform those test on each system under a variety of cluster configurations and data sets.
• Use the information gathered from those actions to develop documentation that explains the methodology and results of our comparative analysis, recommendations for components to use under various use cases, and list suggestions about potential ways the two projects can collaborate moving forward.

See also: https://locationtech.org/mhonarc/lists/location-iwg/msg01550.html

Previous work

There is a project that was developed by CCRi called GeoBench, and we will be working with those developers to understand their approach, learn from that effort and reuse components.

This is a talk by Rob Emanuele at FOSS4G NA 2016, which goes over some of the differences between the frameworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2hT7rzZicA

How can you help?

There is a google form that was created to collect feedback and data from users or potential users of GeoMesa and GeoWave, and for people who have ideas about how this comparative analysis should happen. Please help this effort by giving your responses: https://goo.gl/DB60Bh

Timeline

The Azavea team aims to publish the results of this analysis in fall of 2016.