Spacialist Data Analyzer

Spacialist Data Analyzer is a web application that allows users to analyze data in any of their Spacialist databases.

Prerequisites

• Spacialist (at least v0.6, appears to be compatible also with more recent versions up to v0.7.x) running on your server with at least one database (see Spacialist installation instructions)
• PHP with extension PDO_PGSQL enabled
• Configure your web server to serve index.php as a directory index, e.g. in Apache: DirectoryIndex index.php

Installation

• Clone this repository into any folder served by your web server. The target folder is hereafter referred to as the app folder
• Run npm install and composer install in the app folder
• In the app folder, create a global.ini file with an entry spacialist_root that reflects the absolute local filesystem location of the parent folder of your Spacialist instances, and an entry spacialist_webroot pointing to the path portion of its external URL. For example:

  spacialist_root=/var/www/spacialist
  spacialist_webroot=/spacialist
  

Usage

It is assumed that under the Spacialist instance folder, the actual Spacialist frontend will be served from subfolder s, and the Spacialist Data Analyzer app will be symbolically linked from a sibling folder analysis. In this case, the app will find the .env file of the present Spacialist instance automatically, and you simply direct your browser to the app directory, e.g. https://my.spacialist-server.com/spacialist/some-instance/analysis

If you are not using this default setup, direct your browser to the URL of the app folder and provide an parameter env that reflects the name of the folder of the Spacialist instance relative to the spacialist_root setting defined in global.ini.

For instance, if the Spacialist Data Analyzer app is in the folder data-analyzer, and you would like to use the app with the Spacialist instance in the folder test, then the target URL would be https://my.spacialist-server.com/spacialist/data-analyzer/?env=test

If successful, the browser should display a login page. If opened via a hyperlink from within Spacialist, no login will be necessary.

The properties of the Settings object in js/global.js can be overridden, by providing a JSON object in a file named like the database and located in the settings subfolder. E.g., for the database test, putting { "Settings": { "forceLiveDb": false } } into the file settings/test.json will override the default setting for this property and make the tool fetch the database from the cache rather than laoding it live every time.

Read the User Manual to learn how to use Spacialist Data Analyzer.

Screenshot

The screenshot below shows the Spacialist Data Analyzer main window, offering a hierarchical view of the structure of data in the database (tree on the left), various analysis options (right-top pane, allowing selecting what kind of data to display, filtering based on entity properties, as well as grouping with and aggregation of property values), and various kinds of result displays including geomaps and tabular data (right-bottom pane).

License

Spacialist Data Analyzer is licensed using the MIT License.
(c) 2018 eScience-Center, Univeristy of Tübingen

Acknowledgments

Development of Spacialist Data Analyzer was co-funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg in the "E-Science" funding programme.