RASTA: Rapid Assessment of Spatio-Temporal Algorithms

Recently, there have been significant theoretical advances in the fields of geo-statistics and spatio-temporal statistics. Unfortunately, the rapidly evolving technology has not yet resulted in off-the-shelf commercial toolkits, so the vast majority of the tools exist only as standalone, file based tools in Java, MATLAB, R, or python. Hence, the analysts that are using these technologies are forced to rely upon ad hoc workflows cobbled together from an amalgam of spatial databases, analysis engines and spatial visualization tools, such as ArcMAP or Google Earth. The result: a process that is both inefficient and error prone. During Phase I, PSI will develop a software framework that will allow emerging geo-statistical tools to be readily integrated into the systems of interest. The framework will be demonstrated through the integration of a number of PSI developed spatio-temporal analysis tools that will demonstrate the ability of the framework to support several distinct classes of geospatial and spatio-temporal statistical tools into both ArcMAP and Google Earth. During Phase II, our attention will shift towards creating a more complete set of tools, while at the same time extending the basic toolkit to address meaningful problems not typically addressed in commercial toolkits, such as the handling of missing data.