Under the governance of the UN Committee of Experts on Big Data and Data Science for Official Statistics (UN-CEBD), the Global Platform has built a cloud-service ecosystem to support international collaboration in the development of Official Statistics using new data sources, including big data, and innovative methods and to help countries measure the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to deliver the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.
The Task Team on AIS is a group of participating organisations across the globe made of dozens of statisticians interested in using AIS data (global time-series datasets about vessels’ position and speed) for official statistical and experimental indicators purposes. The Task Team uses the UN Global Platform to store, manage and analyse the AIS data, growing by 300 billion records per year. See an example of their work: Faster indicators of UK economic activity project.
The platform used to rely on an HBase instance for hosting AIS data, and Apache Spark running on the AWS EMR platform for the analysis of this data. The data team at the UN Global Plaform had several challenges with this setup:
The high cost and lack of flexibility of this system prompted the search for a better solution.
Apache Spark now runs on a Kubernetes (EKS) cluster managed by Ocean for Apache Spark. End-users submit programmatic jobs through the API for batch processing, and connect Jupyter notebooks (hosted on Jupyter Hub) for interactive data exploration.
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