May 15, 2013

OpenTreeMap for Tree Inventory: Ursinus College

By Andrew Thompson

When we talk to individuals and organizations interested in using OpenTreeMap to map their urban forests through crowd sourcing, we like to say that OpenTreeMap is a hybrid – half tree inventory tool, and half public engagement and outreach platform. But what do either of those parts mean, concretely? What kinds of goals can you accomplish with a tree inventory and public engagement platform? Over the past several months, through conversations on the opentreemap-user Google Group and at the 2012 Partners in Community Forestry conference, I’ve learned about a few particularly exciting projects happening in our community of OpenTreeMap users. I’ve decided with the leaves finally back and spring planting season upon us, it’s high time to highlight and celebrate what some in the OpenTreeMap community are doing and share it with others through some posts on Azavea Atlas. If you’re using an OpenTreeMap site for a cool project, let me know!

Ursinus College student Amos Almy measures the diameter at breast height (DBH) of a tree on Ursinus' campus.

Ursinus College student Amos Almy measures the diameter at breast height (DBH) of a tree on Ursinus’ campus in suburban Philadelphia.

In this first post, I’ll dive into a campus tree inventory research project that Amos Almy, a student at Ursinus College here in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and his advisor, Professor Patrick Hurley, have started by utilizing PhillyTreeMap.org since the beginning of the Fall 2012 semester.

I met Amos through the opentreemap-user Google Group, when he helped us identify and replicate an issue in PhillyTreeMap where the software wasn’t allowing users to delete their own trees.

I started talking to Amos off-list, and his project is pretty cool. He read an article a while back in The New York Times  about two men mapping all the trees in Central Park, and wanted to do the same thing with all the trees on Ursinus College’s wooded campus. With the support of environmental studies professor Patrick Hurley, Amos turned his idea into an independent research project.

“Our goal was to create a publicly accessible map of the campus’ trees, while also providing a platform for developing a portal to educational information about individual species’ ecological and cultural benefits,” said Amos over email. “I began searching for urban tree maps online…after noticing the ability to export [PhillyTreeMap data] as a Google Earth file, I realized this offered the opportunity to further customize our map and include information on species’ cultural values, forest composition, and tree information. The PhillyTreeMap website also allowed us to use data collected not only in classrooms, but also by students, faculty and the surrounding [Collegeville, PA] community.”

After summer vacation last year, Amos started entering trees into PhillyTreeMap.org, starting with a tree inventory given to him by Ursinus College’s facility services. “I created a system that allowed me to enter trees into the website, then measure those trees with the help of students enrolled in [an environmental studies class],” he said. Over the Fall 2012 semester, Amos and his team added over 1300 trees (!) to PhillyTreeMap.org using the website and PhillyTreeMap iPhone application. By the end of the project, Amos predicts they will have mapped nearly one thousand of the trees on Ursinus’ campus.

Amos’ plans are to take the data he’s collected using PhillyTreeMap, export it to Google Earth-friendly KML format (using OpenTreeMap’s data export functionality), and further annotate a KML-based map of the trees on campus with more extensive icons and information. In particular, Amos and his professor are interested in focusing their KML map on the “cultural values” of tree species: the edible, medicinal, craft-related, or special aesthetic qualities of the types of trees on campus.

“This [annotated KML-based map] will provide a resource for those interested in learning about people’s connections to plants through activities, such as foraging or gathering, and could be used as a learning tool in future classes that are concerned with the interactions between people and forested environments,” explained Amos over email.

But Amos isn’t satisfied with a complete campus tree atlas and useful academic resource. This spring, three of Amos’ fellow students helped map 300 trees in a nearby park  and along streets in the wider Collegeville, PA community. “We hope the borough will advertise this process,” he said, “so that community members might get involved and the borough will have ecosystem service data to consider in future land-use decision-making processes.”

Those interested are welcome to contact Amos Almy at amos.almy@gmail.com, or his advisor Patrick Hurley at phurley@ursinus.edu. If you know of another college or university conducting a tree inventory, let me know in the comments below or email me at athompson@azavea.com. And stay tuned for our next blog post in our series on the OpenTreeMap community!

Comments (0)
Apr 29, 2013

NASA International Space Apps Challenge: One Week Afterward!

By Andrew Thompson

 

It’s a few days after we had over 50 people gather at Drexel’s ExCITe Center for the Philadelphia Global Mainstage of the International Space Apps Challenge, and my colleague Amelia Longo and I can both finally breathe again! The chaos of running around as an organizer before and during the weekend, making sure participants and teams knew the schedule and had everything they needed to produce some great space hacks, has finally subsided. In its place has been contacting teams to make sure they’ll receive their prizes, editing and posting the videos that came out of our live-streaming experiment, and thanking our generous sponsors that made the event possible: ExCITe, First Round, Amazon, Global Advantage, NASTAR, PHLCVB, Science Center, Chariot Solutions, Github, Jarvus, K’NEX, and Ticketleap.

All these smiling faces!

All these smiling faces!

We infused the event with local flavor, including a food truck lunch on Saturday and awesome Mike Tedeschi-designed t-shirts with Philly icons. From young high school students at their first hackathon to other folks new to the hacking scene, we had a great crowd and diverse range of participants with technical and artistic abilities. At 14-years-old, Philly’s youngest participant helped craft the winning team’s International Space Station tracking device with an Arduino microcontroller and locally-manufactured K’NEX building kits. Our location host, Youngmoo Kim of Drexel University’s STEAM-focused ExCITe Center, joined in on the “Listening to the Stars” challenge by playing the sounds of stars through the electromagnetically-enabled piano strings of a specially modified Magnetic Resonator Piano.

Even NASA astronaut Leland Melvin got to play! First graders at a local school also made a star sound concert. Other amazing projects included a light up skirt; two apps with Leap Motion antics; Ruby, D3.js, and Python apps; an astronaut training program; a project that liberated some data; video interviews; and even tools that will get used at both a Phillies game and the ISS.

Personally, being at the event was more exciting than planning it. To be perfectly honest, Amelia and I (along with others at Azavea) were spending so much time on organizing the Space Apps Challenge in the weeks before the event that I was a bit frustrated at how much effort this hackathon and coordinating with NASA was taking. A small part of me doubted whether Space Apps was worth it. That part of me quieted itself over the weekend as I saw how genuinely enthusiastic our participants were to be working on cool projects. I got into the swing of things, running around tweeting and helping teams and NASA do their work. (I actually like that mid-event chaos!) I warmed when I saw the pure joy on people’s faces when they won some of our awesome prizes from NASTAR Center, K’NEX, and Amazon. I smiled at our happy hour on Sunday when many folks stopped to shake my hand for a job well done and say thanks for how much fun they had. Still, the tiniest of doubts remained in my mind.

That nagging doubt was obliterated last Thursday by a certain Director of Civic Technology for the City of Philadelphia, Tim Wisniewski. As I was talking with Tim at another PhillyTechWeek event about how Space Apps fits into Philadelphia’s actually rather short 3-4 year history of civic hackathons, PhillyTechWeeks, and other events, he stopped me. “I tell everyone this is the coolest one! Philadelphia got to have the NASA hackathon. That will be in the history books,” said Tim. I’m paraphrasing a bit, but his point was that Space Apps is cool, memorable, and relatable in ways other hackathons won’t be.

Tim is absolutely right. NASA and the space program’s work is met with adoration from geeks, nerds, and humans of all stripes and colors here in the US and across the world. Space science is also able to inspire wonder in the most diverse audience of people aside from the typical science and tech nerds. Who hasn’t looked up at the night sky with awe before? It should be seen as a milestone for Philadelphia’s slowly-but-surely growing civic tech community that NASA chose us to be at the center – the Global MainStage – of what is to date the largest hackathon in the world. Internationally, 9,147 humans decided to spend two days of their lives designing, building, coding, brainstorming, and collaborating on cheap, quick, fascinating bits of technology to solve real mission-oriented challenges present in NASA, ESA, and other space programs. Our 50+ Philadelphia participants should be proud of the technical solutions they put together themselves. It should be celebrated that the largest hackathon ever was in fact a collaborative, civic event organized by a major government agency in partnership with volunteers around the world – taken seriously even in the face of substantial budget cuts at NASA. Finally, as the civic technology community both in Philadelphia and elsewhere tries to welcome newcomers into the fold, we can hold up Space Apps as a key example of how we work (collaboratively) and what we’re trying to do (solve civic challenges) so that hopefully hacking newcomers can get excited too. For me, at least, those will be the lasting takeaways from Space Apps and cause me to mention it in conversations far into the future.

Even though, after 3 months, my friends and family are sick and tired of hearing me talk about working with astronauts and NASA.

“Did somebody say NASA?!”

Comments (0)
Apr 21, 2013

2013 Summer of Maps Fellows Announced

By Robert Cheetham

Summer of Maps banner

This past week we announced the 2013 Summer of Maps fellows and the non-profit organizations they will work work.  Please join me in congratulating:

Mr. Tyler Dahlberg, MS in GIS for Development and Environment at Clark University, working with:

Ms. Julia Reeves, Growth and Structure of Cities, Haverford College, working with:

Ms. Lena Ferguson, Growth and Structure of Cities, Bryn Mawr College, working with:

We are very excited about working with these talented students and the projects they will develop.

Fellowship Sponsors

We are also enormously grateful to the following organizations for sponsoring a fellow:

Big round of applause to them. Their sponsorships have enabled us to expand the program this year.

 

Comments (0)
Apr 15, 2013

NASA International Space Apps Challenge: One Week to Go!

By Andrew Thompson

At the end of this week, the largest hackathon in history will be upon us, and Azavea will be leading the charge as organizer of the International Space Apps Challenge Global MainStage here in Philadelphia. NASA tells us now over 6,000 people are registered to participate from 83 cities for over 83 hours – from 9am this Friday, Abu Dhabi time, to 9pm this Sunday, Honolulu time – making this year’s Space Apps the largest, most geographically diverse hackathon any one of us has ever heard of and shattering the records of last year’s inaugural event.

My colleague Amelia Longo and I have been pouring over logistical plans, dialing into international conference calls, confirming generous sponsors and prizes, and refining scientific challenges since January. There are still a host of details we have to settle this week before an astronomer, an astronaut, a NASA Deputy CIO and other staff, and close to 100 participants arrive at our opening reception at First Round Capital on Friday, April 19th, and then the main hackathon itself at Drexel’s ExCITe Center on Saturday April 20th at 9am through Sunday April 21st at 5pm. (There’s still room for more – you can register here for the reception and here for the hackathon!)

But when the weekend arrives and folks get started on their projects, I know everything will come together in one collaboration-fueled blaze of creative designs, clacking keyboards, and snapping K’nex parts and hardware components. Sounds a bit like launching a rocket, actualy!

Who should come and what should we bring?

Anyone and yourself! If you want to learn new skills or build on old ones, meet astronaut (and former NFL football player) Leland Melvin, collaborate with cool people in Philadelphia and around the world, get swag, win awesome prizes, and eat some free Philly food – we want you at Space Apps Philly! Conversely, if you really don’t like learning things or meeting awesome people, you probably should stay at home. But really, you’re missing out.

Everyone who plans on working on some kind of data visualization or programming challenge would be smart to bring a laptop. We’ll have plenty of Wi-Fi, power, and table space for you at the ExCITe Center.

If you want to build or hack something more physical, you should bring anything you need to do that – Arduinos, solder, et cetera. Thanks to our sponsors K’nex, the NASTAR Center, and Leap Motion, we will have plenty of K’nex building kits for hackers young and old to use, as well as a few fancy Leap Motion USB motion-sensing controllers!

If you’re not going to be at the team-building reception on Friday night (you should be!), we recommend you go over the 15 challenges we’ll be highlighting in Philly before Saturday, just so you’ll have an idea of what to expect or what team you might be interested in joining or forming.

You said something about prizes and swag?

Yes! On Sunday, our panel of judges – including Franklin Institute Astronomer Derrick Pitts, NASA Deputy CIO Deborah Diaz, and Philadelphia Chief Data Officer Mark Headd – will listen to presentations from each team and then be empowered to award prizes to teams as they see fit. Those prizes include:

How cool are those? In addition to those wonderful sponsors, we’d like to thank our other generous sponsors ExCITe Center, First Round Capital, Global Advantage, PHL Convention and Visitors Bureau, Science Center, Chariot Solutions, Jarvus Innovations, Github, and Ticketleap. Their support has made the event possible, and many of them are providing odds and ends for the tote bags we’ll be giving to each participant!

Space Apps sounds so cool! Andrew, what challenge are you going to work on?

The plight of being an organizer is that I think I’ll be spending so much time ensuring a fantastic event for all of you, I don’t think I’ll get to join a team. But, here are the challenges I’d be really excited to see come out of Space Apps!

Curiosity at Home

Now that the real Curiosity rover is incommunicado for a month, there is a clear need for us to build apps and projects that keep us excited about its discoveries until it comes back and mesmerizes us once more with new pictures and data. When Robert, Amelia, and I were reading the 50 challenge drafts NASA sent us weeks ago, one of us came up with an idea that has stuck with me: Make a relative map of Curiosity’s movement, as if it was on Earth!

JPL and NASA have made available images of Curiosity’s movements. It could be tricky to gather at first, but one could deduce the distance of each line segment and directional bearing from those images. (Or, we could ask NASA to release that raw data, since we’ll have their ear over the weekend!) Then, you could plot those on some sort of browsable Leaflet or Google Map of an area here on Earth. This would make the distances Curiosity has traveled and the discoveries at each point much easier for us earthlings to relate to. How far can Curiosity travel in a day? How many city blocks is that? How tightly clustered are these discoveries? What kinds of discoveries might we find in Fairmount Park if we paid attention to our steps as intently as the rover does?

Seeing Water From Space

I know the GeoTrellis team is excited about this one. The challenge focuses on analyzing satellite data of Chile’s water resources both temporally and spatially. I’ve seen some concepts of temporal mapping with CartoDB’s Torque library, and I’ve seen (and done) some raster-based spatial analysis both with ArcGIS and GeoTrellis. Temporal mapping and raster analysis are each pretty cool (and can be pretty colorful!), but imagine if they were combined somehow in this challenge? That’s a visualization I’d love to see.

Others

The ham radio operator in me sees potential, existing data, and a community of interest in the “Solar Flare” challenge, especially considering the recent Coronal Mass Ejection that theoretically some of the northeast US was able to see this weekend. I wasn’t able to see it, so a visualization would have been the next best thing! Also, if a good game came out of the “No Delays” air traffic challenge, it would live right next to the Flight Simulator icon on my desktop.

There are so many challenges! So many people are coming! The only real question is – will you come and build something with us this weekend?

 

Comments (0)
Apr 12, 2013

What I’m Loving About Digital Humanities This Month

By Deb Boyer

It’s been a month since I returned from a trip to South by Southwest Interactive where I was fortunate to be part of a fun panel on “Why Digital Maps Can Reboot Cultural History.” Has it taken me a whole month to recover from four days in Austin? Nope, I’m just lucky enough to have spent the last few weeks being busy with a number of digital humanities (DH) events and projects. Libraries/archives/museums/technology ended up being one of my themes for March, and that’s a theme I can always get behind.

Full scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope on display at SXSW.

For the past few years, there has been a small but strong contingent of library, archives, and museum (LAM) people at SXSW. Along with checking out the newest 3D printers at SXSW Create and visiting the full-scale model of NASA’s Webb Space Telescope, I also had the chance to attend some fantastic panels related to technology and its use in and by cultural institutions. Perhaps one of the most engaging was the “Culture Hack: Libraries and Museums Open For Making” panel with representatives from Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America, CLIR Digital Library Federation, and the Open Knowledge Foundation. I’m very excited for the imminent launch of the Digital Public Library of America on April 18 and intrigued by the possibilities for linking collections in order to support wider usage of current and historical materials.

Beyond the “official” SXSW sessions, I dropped by the ER&L + ProQuest #ideadrop house for more casual conversations with librarians and others interested in the combination of technology and cultural heritage materials. The house was a bit away from downtown Austin, but it was worth the trek for the great discussion on open source tools for cultural institutions. Unexpectedly stumbling upon the delicious food at a Korean/Mexican fusion food truck didn’t hurt either.

That collaboration and sharing of ideas is one of my favorites parts of the LAM and digital humanities culture.  Thankfully, we have an active DH community here in Philly so hearing about new innovations isn’t limited to annual conferences or only reading Twitter announcements. The Greater Philadelphia Digital Humanities Group (PhillyDH for short) partially grew out of THATCamp Philly, an unconference held in Philadelphia each fall that provides individuals with a place to discuss ideas and develop possible collaborations. I’ve been involved in THATCamp Philly for awhile and am happy to see the initiative expanding. Even though PhillyDH is just a few months old, the group has already held a Digital Project Incubator event with a PhillyDH@Penn workshop/conference day planned for June 4 and other workshops and events coming soon. PhillyDH is a decentralized organization (meaning we’re not linked to any particular institution) and anyone is welcome to join.

Other local Philly professional groups are also focusing more on how technology intersects with their work. Continuing with the “March = DH” theme, I gave a presentation at the March meeting of the Delaware Valley Archivists Group on the digital metrics we gather for PhillyHistory.org, the website that provides access to the historic photographs of the Philadelphia City Archives. We’re data geeks here at Azavea so we’ve implemented three different systems for tracking how people use PhillyHistory. That makes for a lot of data, which can be both useful and overwhelming. Evaluation of digital projects and user engagement seems to be a key issue as more organizations explore expanding their online and mobile presence. After we build these amazing digital projects, how do we actually measure whether they are meeting our intended goals? The group had some intriguing questions, and I’m interested to see the best practices and standards that will develop as the DH field wrestles with project evaluation.

Along with a few other DH related things, we ended March and kicked off April with an announcement of our recent Small Business Innovation Research award from the National Science Foundation to develop the Temporal Geocoder, a web-based tool that will enable historians, scholars, the public, and others to assign geographic locations to historical materials. After geocoding thousands of photographs for PhillyHistory.org, I can tell you all about the fun of finding the location of an address that no longer exists (I’m looking at you – portions of E. Noble Street!). With a large spatial component to many DH projects, we’re hoping a temporal geocoder will fit well with the work being done at the New York Public Library, OpenStreetMap, and other organizations around historic locations.

Temporal geocoders, historic digital maps, linked data repositories, and user evaluation metrics are just the start of what I’m finding interesting about DH these days. Gaming, user generated content, and digital storytelling are high on my list of topics to explore next. Perhaps April will need to be another month of digital humanities…

 

Comments (0)
Apr 01, 2013

Quoting and Invoicing Projects in Bitcoins

By Jeremy Heffner

Azavea is pleased to announce that starting April 1st, 2013 (today) we will be quoting and invoicing projects in Bitcoins instead of US Dollars.   The currency switch allows us to streamline our expansion into international markets by standardizing on one globally available currency.  Furthermore, embracing a new digital currency is aligned with the ethos of Azavea around innovation, transparency, and web-based systems.

Embracing Bitcoins as our currency of record was only a matter of time due to our focus on digital innovation at Azavea.  We look forward to working with our clients to aid the transition to this new currency. — Robert Cheetham, CEO

Besides charging clients in the new Bitcoin currency, Azavea will begin paying staff members in the new currency starting at the end of this month.  With Bitcoin transactions completing in approximately 10 minutes, this change provides additional time for our CEO to submit payroll and automatically provides access to salaries and reimbursements to staff.

I’m excited not to have to remember to deposit reimbursement checks.   The new digital currency will also allow me to script transactions against my Bitcoin Wallet. — Bennet Huber, software developer

For questions about our switch to Bitcoin or to receive a wallet address to remit payment to, please contact us at info@azavea.com.

Comments (0)
Mar 08, 2013

Modeling Count-based Raster Data with R and ArcGIS

By Jeremy Heffner

We’ve recently been working with the team at the Rutgers Center on Public Security to build a desktop utility that helps crime analysts build robust and statistically valid models of the risk of crime at locations within their jurisdiction.   These models are  useful in predicting the levels of crime at different locations so that a police department can better allocate resources.  While we are working with crime data, the process of modeling the number of events that happen in a given geographic area for a given time period has broad application.  Whether you are modeling the density of trees across a landscape, the number of cell phone calls in different neighborhoods, or the number of crimes on a street, the goal is to explain the rate of events as a function of the nature of the location.

Why do events occur where they do?

GIS analysts are often familiar with the regression models that are available within ArcGIS for Desktop such as ordinary least squares (OLS) or geographically weighted regression(GWR).  If you are not familiar with them, I’d encourage you to take a look at Esri’s online training seminars.  It’s good stuff.

While these techniques are often useful, they assume a normal distribution of the response variable within the model.   If the counts within your units of analysis are large enough, it is possible to use these techniques as an approximation of the underlying distribution.  That said, count data is fundamentally not a normal distribution and there are better options that should be used.

The problem with regression models that assume a normal distribution quickly becomes apparent as the unit of analysis shrinks.   If you are modeling data at a fine geographic resolution such as in a raster, you will often have many cells that have no events and a low average count across the cells.  In these situations it is utterly incorrect to use an OLS or GWR model within ArcGIS.

Instead, ArcGIS can be used to geographically process your data to a set of counts and variable values within each raster cell.   This data set can then be exported and analyzed in statistical software packages that provide more appropriate models.   For example, count data can often be represented as a generalized linear model. The free and open source R project provides many packages that can build such a model.   To learn more about how this process can work, take a look at the presentation embedded within this post.

Comments Off
  • Azavea Journal
  • Azavea Atlas
  • Azavea Labs
  • Azavea.com