How to get collected geospatial data & transformations uploaded to a server to then get API key for use in custom Power BI Map

Question

We have collected satellite data and used databricks to do some custom transformations. We now have tiff files that hold the images we want. We need to upload these images to some sort of server that can then be referenced by an API in Power BI so we can use it with a custom map visual. Not sure the feasibility around this or the best way to go about it.

Answer 1

The first thing you would most likely need to do is expose a service that serves the Tiff images as web Mercator tiles as the raw tiff files are likely very large and generally wouldn't be loadable directly into the client side as is. TiTiler is a good option for this. A short description of how to do this is documented here: https://github.com/microsoft/satellite-imagery-labeling-tool/blob/main/docs/GeoTiffs.md

Once you have a tile service exposed there are different options for visualizing this in Power BI. The Azure Maps visual that is built into Power BI does have a custom tile layer option where you could one layer in. However, that doesn't support multiple tile layers which you might want (one layer per image unless you are stitching multiple images together).

Creating a custom Power BI visual would allow you to add the ability to add and switch between multiple tile layers, and to customize how Power BI data is integrated. Official docs on how to create custom Power BI visuals can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/developer/visuals/develop-power-bi-visuals I don't believe there is a custom map example, however, once you have the main framework setup for the visual, it basically becomes a web app and the Azure Maps Web SDK or similar web map SDK would be fairly straight forward to use based on their docs/samples.