Voronoi Polygons, 101

Yesterday’s post, How AI Helps Find Electricity in the Wind, explored how data can help accelerate our national project for clean energy. Catalina Herrera, David Carr, and Geoffrey S. Lakings explained how data is essential for the greater good. But if you can’t visualize it, data is useless.

The Voronoi Polygon is one tool that can help. I think of it as the Where’s Waldo? of data visualization. They help humans make decisions that involve location, like the best location for a wind turbine. Watch this 55-second tutorial to see how they work.

Today’s #ModsMonday challenge is to create an open, community Voronoi Polygon Mod for Spotfire. Not only could a community Mod help accelerate clean energy production, but it could also help solve any important location-dependent question.

Peter Shaw describes his community Voronoi Polygon Data Function, freely available in the TIBCO community, that combines location data and the algorithms that could power a Voronoi Polygon Mod.

The next step is to marry Peter Shaw’s work with a visualization Mod so anyone can explore the wind.

But the real power is that Voronoi Mods could help solve any location problem with data and AI, like the Missing Maps project, understanding the pandemic, or, yes, even finding Waldo.