latitd

Latitd is an open data concept used in geospatial data analysis to describe the Latitudinal-Temporal Distribution of events. It provides a compact representation of how events cluster across latitude and over time, using a minimal set of fields: latitude, longitude, timestamp, and an intensity value. The format is designed to be agnostic to sensor modality and to support both gridded and irregular spatiotemporal partitions.

When computing latitd, data can be binned into latitudinal bands and time windows; each bin stores aggregate statistics such as count, mean intensity, and variance. The reference schema encourages use of the WGS84 coordinate system and ISO 8601 timestamps; typical serializations include JSON and Parquet.

Latitd originated in the geospatial analytics community in the early 2020s as a lightweight alternative to full spatiotemporal databases for large-scale aggregation tasks. It is intended to enable rapid cross-domain comparisons of event densities, as well as visualization in standard mapping tools.

Applications include climate research, wildlife tracking, epidemiology, and disaster response; the approach is particularly suited to exploratory analysis and dashboarding where simple aggregation is sufficient.

Limitations include potential loss of precision due to binning, sensitivity to grid resolution, and the need for consistent temporal granularity. The specification remains evolving, with reference implementations in Python and JavaScript and optional bindings for SQL-based analytics.

See also geospatial indexing, spatiotemporal databases, gridding, binning.