GeoArrow is een kolomgeoriënteerd formaat voor geospatiale data, gebaseerd op Apache Arrow. Ideaal voor big-data-analyse, ML-pipelines en visualisatie. Werkt met DuckDB, Pandas, Polars en andere Arrow-compatibele tools.
Belangrijkste functies

Over het GeoArrow-formaat
Apache Arrow is the standard for representing tables in memory: columns lie contiguously, the schema is described explicitly, and different programs read the very same bytes without copying or re-encoding. GeoArrow is the agreement on how to store geometry inside that structure so that GeoPandas, DuckDB, Polars, deck.gl and GDAL understand it.
The format is taken when data is not displayed but computed: spatial joins over millions of features, feature preparation for a model, a dashboard on top of a columnar engine. At those volumes, parsing text GeoJSON eats more time than the analysis itself.
The output is a single .arrow file (Apache Arrow IPC, also known as Feather v2). All the layers are merged into one table, and every row has a layer column with the name of its source layer. Geometry is stored as a binary column in WKB format, and the WGS84 (EPSG:4326) coordinate system is described in the schema metadata per the GeoArrow 1.0.0 convention.
By default the file is compressed with the zstd codec; you can choose lz4 or no compression at all. There is a safety limit of 10 million features per export, so as not to eat up the server's memory.
Welk programma opent GeoArrow-bestanden
De volgende programma's en toepassingen kunnen GeoArrow (Apache Arrow)-bestanden (.arrow) die uit OSM2CDR zijn geëxporteerd openen, bewerken en verwerken:
Format specifications
- Open standard
- 3D coordinates supported
- Lossless (no quality loss)
- Stores feature attributes
- Output: 1 file
- GeoArrow .arrow (Apache Arrow extension). In-memory columnar geometry, zero-copy interop with pandas, R, Julia.
Wie gebruikt GeoArrow-kaarten
GeoArrow exporteren
Openen na de export
- Python — pyarrow.ipc.open_file("map.arrow").read_all() gives you the table; the geometry is restored from the WKB column with shapely.from_wkb or geopandas.
- DuckDB — INSTALL spatial; LOAD spatial; then SELECT * FROM 'map.arrow' and ST_GeomFromWKB on the geometry column.
- Polars and pandas — pl.read_ipc("map.arrow") or reading through pyarrow: the attribute part works like an ordinary table, with no geo wrapping.
- R and Julia — the arrow packages read the same file: it is one format across all languages, no conversion needed.
- Visualization and GIS — lonboard and deck.gl draw Arrow tables directly; for QGIS it is easier to convert to GeoPackage with ogr2ogr (GDAL 3.8 and newer).
Populaire kaarten in GeoArrow
Ontvang GeoArrow (Apache Arrow)-kaartexports
Download professionele GeoArrow-kaarten van OpenStreetMap. Directe generatie, elk gebied.
Veelgestelde vragen
Verwante formaten
Vaak samen geëxporteerd
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