The Socioeconomic Mapping and Resource Topography (SMART)
system leverages the Kaleidocade™ Indicators Framework (KIF) to enable users to map and analyze aggregated community data along with resource information about federally-funded programs to address juvenile delinquency and crime.

Client: US Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

Challenge:  The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is tasked with providing national leadership, coordination, and resources to prevent and respond to juvenile delinquency and victimization.  OJJDP wanted to develop a web-based tool that would provide up-to-date information on incidents of crime and delinquency as well as the social risk factors that contribute to juvenile delinquency and the federal resources available to counter these risks.  The application would need to operate national scale data available and be easy to use for a broad target audience that would include federal and state program administrators, juvenile justice professionals, local law enforcement agencies, members of community organizations and grant recipients.  It would also have to provide information at a variety of geographic levels in a highly customizable manner.

Solution: OJJDP chose to build the Socioeconomic Mapping and Resource Topography (SMART) using Azavea’s Kaleidocade Indicators Framework.  After registering, site users select indicators and then rapidly generate maps, tables, summary statistics, charts, and reports for over 100 indicators and 18 types of resources.  The system contains more than 3 million rows of demographic data, economic indicators, educational data, youth risk factors, and statistical indexes. The indicators are aggregated to states, counties, and census tracts for the entire United States and while they are grouped into nine categories users have the ability to create their own collections of indicators for side-by-side analysis.  The data are drawn from a variety of sources including the US Census Bureau, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Labor.

Outcomes:  More than 2,500 users access the SMART system to complete a wide array of tasks.  Grant program managers are able to easily map the distribution of grant sites in relation to indicators of interest.  Local law enforcement and administrators are able to analyze their localities in relation to surrounding areas and identify underserved areas that might benefit from additional services.  Grantees can use the site to easily collect data to write better and more accurate grant reports and stronger applications for new programs.  All of these groups benefit from the compilation of data from different sources, a process that might otherwise be prohibitively time consuming.

For more information, visit: http://smart.gismapping.info