Data Observatory

The Data Observatory section of the Workspace allows users to find the best data for their use case among the thousands of spatial datasets available in the CARTO’s Spatial Data Catalog.

From the Spatial Data Catalog, you can:

• Explore the catalog to find the data that best suits your needs.

• Access free samples of most public and premium datasets.

• Subscribe to any of our public datasets or submit requests to start the licensing process of premium datasets from our vetted data sources.

Your subscriptions and samples

You subscriptions and samples can be accessed through:

• Your own connections: CARTO will make the data available in your data warehouse, for seamless interoperability with your own data:

  • CARTO Data Warehouse: You will find a Data Observatory (US) folder with all your samples and subscriptions. Learn more about the CARTO Data Warehouse structure.

  • BigQuery connections: Your connections will automatically gain access to a BigQuery project called carto-data , which will contain a dataset with all the samples and subscriptions available in your account. This dataset will be located in the US multi-region — if you need a different region, please request a transfer as covered in Access data in BigQuery.

  • Other data warehouses: To gain access to Data Observatory datasets in other data warehouses, follow our specific guides:

    • Access data in Snowflake

    • Access data in Redshift

    • Access data in Databricks

    • Access data in PostgreSQL

• The Data Observatory section of the Data Explorer.

From there, you can:

• Manage your subscriptions and samples.

• Request access to your subscriptions from your own data warehouse.

Additionally, Admin users can get a list with the status of all the Data Observatory subscriptions in the organization from the Settings section.

Data access and analysis

You can access your subscriptions directly from your data warehouses connected to CARTO. In order to do that the CARTO team will take care of transferring the data from your Data Observatory subscriptions to the desired location of your data warehouse by leverage the native private sharing mechanisms of that platform. The Data Observatory is currently supported for BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift and PostgreSQL connections. To start the process to get your subscription data transferred to your data warehouse please contact your CARTO representative.

By default and in order to allow users to start leveraging and assessing the data from their subscriptions straightaway, data is accessible via the CARTO Data Warehouse connection (when available).

Access information specific to each data warehouse can be checked through the Access in button available in the dataset’s detail page. Please refer to this step-by-step guide to learn more.

The Analytics Toolbox for BigQuery, Snowflake and Redshift offer a set of functions to enrich your datasets with any of the variables from your Data Observatory subscriptions by performing a spatial join between them and your own data. Enrichment is an essential step to incorporate Data Observatory data into your spatial analysis workflows.

Please check out the following resources to learn more:

• BigQuery: data enrichment functions and step-by-step guide.

• Snowflake: data enrichment functions.

• Redshift: data enrichment functions.

Data visualization

To visualize Data Observatory datasets, you can use CARTO Workspace using Builder. You can do so by clicking on the "Create map" action in the subscription’s detail page from the Data Observatory section of the Data Explorer. Alternatively, you can add a new Data Observatory source to an existing map.

Or by adding a new Data Observatory source to an existing map: