Modern GIS teams share a common problem: how to quickly make sense of a massive amount of spatial data. Data comes in all sorts of shapes, it rarely fits in administrative boundaries, and often requires indexing. That's where H3 comes in — by dividing the world into hexagonal shapes, the data becomes easier to understand, and faster to work with. And now Felt’s enterprise users can create H3 visualizations with just a click.
What is H3?
H3 is a hierarchical geospatial indexing system. It divides the Earth's surface into hexagonal cells at multiple resolutions, providing a uniform grid for spatial analysis. Spatial indexes like H3 provide tons of benefits, like:
- Efficient data storage and retrieval
- Fast proximity searches
- Aggregating and visualizing data at different scales
- Optimizing routing and logistics
With these benefits, it’s become a go-to for modern companies – but it’s also been complicated to deploy an H3 visualization. Until now.
Simplicity meets power: automatic H3 with Felt
Felt is designed for fast-moving teams. And for teams using H3, we’ve eliminated extra steps preparing and pre-binning data from the process to help you move as quickly as possible. Our powerful data pipeline automates it all – not a single line of SQL or Python needed.
Felt’s H3 support includes:
- On-the-fly H3 binning - select the H3 visualization and watch your data become tessellated hex bins.
- Auto resolution scaling - Felt will pick a resolution based your zoom and adjust the bins and legend automatically.
- Precision picker - for more control, set a resolution that works best with your dataset.
- Instant summary statistics - statistical summaries of your binned attributes are at your fingertips
Build directly from (and alongside) any source
H3 visualization works right alongside all our other features, making it easy to connect your data and achieve your goals:
- Apply H3 to live datasets connected from your source, like Postgres, Databricks, Big Query or Snowflake so you’re always working with the latest data.
- Overlay H3 hexagons on existing raster or vector data layers to get a complete picture.
- Build apps or dashboards that make it easy to drill down into the data.
- Comment and reply on new insights without leaving the map, accelerating feedback cycles.
Whether you’re investigating potential expansion areas for your business, or analyzing weather patterns to underwrite insurance risk, you can accomplish your entire project in Felt.
Learn more about H3
We are on a mission to deliver a modern GIS experience for fast-moving teams. It doesn’t matter whether your data is a flat file on your computer, a binary on a server or some rows on a database: Felt will work with it. And now H3 visualization support, the insights from even your largest datasets are just a click away. If you’re using H3 at your organization and want to start visualizing your data in Felt, we’d love to hear about your use case. Please reach out to our sales team.
