An Observation is a data container for the most granular unit of data that can be stored in Geotime. An Observation is a piece of data about something at a specific time and place. For instance, a GPS ping from a commercial cargo ship, which not only includes the location of the ship and the time of the ping, but also information such as the name of the vessel as well as the flag under which it is flying.
Every Observation belongs to a series called a Track. A Track is a collection of Observations of the same entity over some period of time. As an example, a single GPS ping from a plane traveling from San Francisco to New York would be recorded as a single Observation. The collection of Observations recorded throughout the entire flight would be grouped under a single Track. Tracks can vary in size and can contain many Observations or they can be single Observation Tracks.
Observations have properties that are divided into two categories; static and live. Static properties are properties that are not expected to change between Observations within a track. For example, the tail number of a plane. On the other hand, live properties are expected to change frequently between Observations, for example the altitude or heading of a plane.
Observations conform to a schema called an Observation Spec, which defines the shape of the data contained within the Observation. Observation Specs are dynamically defined with Palantir administrative tooling to match the shape of ingested geotemporal data. An Observation Spec must be defined before data can be ingested into Geotime. Newly written Observations must match an existing Observation Spec or they will not be indexed.