GeoParquet

GeoParquet provides a pure JavaScript workflow to read and convert GeoParquet files into GeoJSON. Under the hood, it uses the hyparquet library for efficient in-browser parquet parsing, enabling minimal overhead and fast loading.

Why GeoParquet?

GeoParquet is an emerging standard for storing geospatial vector data in the columnar Parquet format. By leveraging Parquet’s columnar storage, GeoParquet files can be significantly more compact and faster to query than their GeoJSON equivalents, especially for large datasets. This can result in:

• Smaller file sizes: A GeoParquet file plus this lightweight library can often be much smaller than the equivalent GeoJSON, reducing bandwidth costs and improving load times.
• Faster loading: Pure JavaScript parsing of Parquet files in the browser, with tiny package size means fast page load times.
• Seamless integration: GeoParquet is based on well-established standards (GeoJSON, Parquet), ensuring broad compatibility and extensibility.

Usage

Convert a GeoParquet file to GeoJSON:

const { asyncBufferFromUrl, toGeoJson } = await import('geoparquet')

const file = asyncBufferFromUrl({ url: 'example.parquet' })
const geoJson = toGeoJson({ file })

Demo

Check out the live demo to see GeoParquet in action.

Parquet Compression Formats

By default, geoparquet.js supports the most common parquet compression formats: uncompressed and snappy compression. To enable support for other compression codecs, such as gzip, brotli, zstd, etc you can use the compressors option. The hyparquet-compressors package adds support for all parquet compression codecs:

import { asyncBufferFromFile, toGeoJson } from 'geoparquet'
import { compressors } from 'hyparquet-compressors'

const file = asyncBufferFromFile('example.zstd.parquet')
const geoJson = toGeoJson({ file, compressors })

References

• https://geoparquet.org/
• https://github.com/opengeospatial/geoparquet
• https://geojson.org/
• https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7946
• https://github.com/hyparam/hyparquet
• https://github.com/hyparam/hyparquet-compressors
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-known_text_representation_of_geometry