Evaluating large environmental data sets is essential at contaminated sediment sites, but project teams often face challenges in doing so quickly and efficiently. A key obstacle is the difficulty in rapidly analyzing various data types—both structured and unstructured—that are often collected by different entities. Structured data, such as analytical chemistry results from upland sites and adjacent waterbodies, must be integrated with other critical data types like GIS data, including hydrodynamic modeling outputs, property boundaries, discharge pathways, and historical site layouts. Yet, it’s not just structured data that poses a challenge. In many cases, unstructured data such as PDFs, text documents, images, and videos are also crucial for assessing environmental discharge history, chemical use, pollutant releases, and identifying potentially responsible parties.

To address these challenges, InSight provides an interactive and user-friendly platform that enables real-time analysis of diverse and complex data sets. This powerful tool allows users to interact with massive amounts of data—without needing to install any software—by viewing and analyzing information through an intuitive web-based interface. InSight supports a wide range of data types, summarizing them in dynamic maps, charts, and tables. Users can easily filter data, toggle layers on or off, and select data points on a map, with the corresponding visuals and statistical outputs automatically updating in real time. Analytical chemistry data, for example, can be overlaid on GIS base layers, providing an immediate connection between research findings and potential contamination sources.

InSight has been successfully used both internally and externally, allowing project teams to evaluate millions of rows of data efficiently. It has proven invaluable during meetings, enabling teams to address questions and scenarios in real time. The platform’s ability to model “what-if” scenarios has also been particularly useful, allowing data to be screened against variable criteria and immediately visualized in tables, maps, and figures. This eliminates the need for generating static, one-time-use visuals, making the decision-making process faster and more effective. By putting spatial data visualization and analytics directly into the hands of the project team, InSight ensures that all relevant data, whether structured or unstructured, can be evaluated swiftly to guide the investigation and decision-making process.