Blog on Geospatial

[alamb]

• Part of [Epic] Blog Posts #146

We recently added Geospatial (Geometry/Geography) types to parquet format -- see https://parquet.apache.org/docs/file-format/types/geospatial/

However, the only documentation that currently exists is the low level technical spec.

This is somewhat awkward when trying to explain to others what these types are and why they should consider adding Variant support to their systems: there is no high level overview / link to point people at.

I suggest a blog post on https://parquet.apache.org/blog/ with a high level

1. Explain the usecase of Geospatial types (probably obvious, but highlighting why native parquet support is important, like bounding boxes)
2. Gives a technical overview of the types (e.g. how they are stored)

I would love a story arc that also highlights the fact that this is a major new addition to the Parquet spec and that it has already seen wide adoption https://parquet.apache.org/docs/file-format/implementationstatus/

[alamb]

@kylebarron / @paleolimbot you know of any good source material for writing a geospatial themed parquet blog post?

[alamb]

I think @jiayuasu said on he mailing list he was considering working on this too: https://lists.apache.org/thread/49p0l8tpqyn4lc2wrd23ngszrbktm4c4

Thanks, Julien.

I will start a google doc about the Parquet Geo type blog! I will also
ping Dewey for some help.

[paleolimbot]

We clearly didn't get to that 😬 . I'm still willing to draft this (but I am also not offended if it's been way too long and somebody else would like to do so first!).

Here is some content I happen to know about. This is all from the "hey geo people! Use Parquet!" angle (there is also an angle from a helping primarily non-spatial workflows/users/engines improve fidelity/performance). I also agree it was amazing and should be highlighted how quickly we were able to implement and release support in so many implementations!

• https://cloudnativegeo.org/blog/2025/02/geoparquet-2.0-going-native/
• https://wherobots.com/blog/apache-iceberg-and-parquet-now-support-geo/
• https://dewey.dunnington.ca/slides/coc2025/#/title-slide (slides from my Community over Code talk last year about this)
• https://dewey.dunnington.ca/post/2025/lazy-geoparquet-reading-in-sedonadb-duckdb-geopandas-and-gdal/ (technical details of how pruning works with a section on why this can be better with built-in types)

[wgtmac]

cc @jiayuasu @szehon-ho as this is a joint work with Apache Iceberg and there is a great talk on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_L5IiteJ5w

[jiayuasu]

thanks for pinging me. I will start to prepare a draft and share with you guys this week!

[jiayuasu]

Hi @alamb @wgtmac , we (@paleolimbot @Kontinuation @zhangfengcdt @jiayuasu ) put a draft of Parquet Geo blog post (still WIP): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JPK0F6Vn4sjXGO4AzrkywOjlj_ybDV_6v0zuaFIIjlk/edit?usp=sharing

Please feel free to leave comments.

[alamb]

Thanks @jiayuasu -- I think it looks great -- I added some comments. I think this would make a strong addition to the parquet site. When you are ready, perhaps I can help prepare a PR to get it posted (or feel free to do so as well)

[paleolimbot]

Thank you Jia for prodding us all to get this together and Andrew for comments! I added the quick Python demo at the bottom and a picture with a lot of bounding boxes of row groups since everybody loves map. Feel free to take or leave!

[szehon-ho]

Nice writeup @jiayuasu !

[jiayuasu]

@alamb @szehon-ho @paleolimbot @wgtmac Hey guys, I believe I've addressed all comments. The blog post is good to go. I am happy to create a PR if you think the blog is ready.

[alamb]

Thank you @jiayuasu -- I took another look through the blog and it looks great to me. I think it is a really nice high level overview of the feature as well as explanation of usecase and history 🏆

I agree a PR is the right next step

To hopefully save you some time, I hacked together a template (e.g. where to put the images, etc) here in case that is helpful):

• [BLOG] Template for Geospatial Blog #155