Date: May 15, 2015 Author: Talya Cunningham Source: Newsplex.com (
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CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (NEWSPLEX) -- Commonwealth Computer Research Inc. specializes in data science and analysis. The Charlottesville company hit the big leagues of technology landing a partnership with the multibillion-dollar company Google.
"Almost ten years later, they called us up and wanted us to be apart of it and that's pretty exciting," said Product Manager Jim Hughes.
Years in the making, Google just released Cloud Big Table to the public. It allows storage for large amounts of spatial data, which deals with geographic location.
"Spacial data is kind of unusual because you have a lot of special attributes," said Jamie Conklin, Director of Operations. "I could say show me all the points within four miles of a school or show me all the points along this road because of the spatial characteristics that makes sense to you and me, but there is no way to pull that out of a normal database."
Facing this issue Google reached out to CCRI after reading an article about the company. CCRI and Google formed a partnership, and with a couple trips to the drawing board ,GeoMesa was created.
There are a lot of tools, but this is the first one that works in the cloud," said Conklin.
GeoMesa is software connected to Big Table that allows geographic data to be stored in the cloud. This allows companies to share resources on multiple servers.
"Where are people with positive tweets tweeting from, do people who live close to movie theaters have positive things to say about it versus people who are far away from movie theaters, how does your location influence what you're saying on twitter," said Conklin. "Those are the kind of things you can start to answer."
The chance to collaborate with a company leading the industry comes with its own benefits.
"Partnering with Google gives us greater visibility," said Hughes. "It also gives us a chance to talk to some of the engineers who are experts at the key value store."
Although there has been no financial exchange between Google and CCRI at this time, Google is pointing to CCRI as a solutions provider.
