On Thursday, March 8, we hosted “Exploring Collaborative Tree Inventory with OpenTreeMap,” a webinar that provided an introduction to the many features of OpenTreeMap – an open source system for collaboratively mapping the urban forest.
OpenTreeMap enables organizations to work together with the public to map and inventory the urban forest. The software is currently being used in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Sacramento to display, map, and update tree inventories – effectively and cost-efficiently. With OpenTreeMap, tree information, including photos, can be added and updated using a simple web-based system. Users can view the ecosystem benefits of the trees in their area and search for trees by species, location, or other filters.
As part of this webinar, we discussed how OpenTreeMap can:
- Enable collaborative urban tree inventory projects
- Calculate and display the ecosystem benefits of the urban forest
- Engage the community in the care and maintenance of neighborhood trees
For a recording of the webinar, please see the below video. You can also view the recording on YouTube or access the slides on Slideshare. If you have any questions about OpenTreeMap, please feel free to contact me at dboyer@azavea.com.
This past Wednesday we hosted a webinar that was a bit different than our prior HunchLab webinars. In our previous webinars, we would cover the functionality that we’ve built into our HunchLab product as well as provide some background into how underlying algorithms work.
This most recent webinar, however, is designed to give crime analysts ten concrete actions they can take to improve their analysis. Some of the topics we covered are practiced by many police departments; other topics are newer and less commonly utilized.
Our ten steps are grouped into three categories:
- ways of improving data quality (which improves analytic results)
- analytic techniques
- use cases (which increase the value of crime data to a community)
Video Recording
Also available on Youtube, Slideshare and as a PDF of slides.
For the past year, we’ve been hard at work on OpenTreeMap, the open source software for collaborative, geography-enabled urban tree inventory. With funding from USDA and CALFIRE and in collaboration with Urban Ecos and TreeKIT, we’ve added new features and made exciting plans for future development (can anyone say mobile app…hint, hint…). OpenTreeMap now powers websites in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Sacramento with other cities in the works!
Many municipalities must deal with the complex process of maintaining the urban forest. As an open source software project, OpenTreeMap can be a valuable tool that enables organizations to work together with the public to map and inventory the urban forest.
On March 8, from 1-2pm ET, we’ll be hosting a free webinar where we’ll discuss the major features of OpenTreeMap and how it can assist with public engagement. To discover more about OpenTreeMap or ask questions about the software, please feel free to join us!
During the webinar, you will learn how OpenTreeMap can:
- Enable collaborative urban tree inventory projects
- Calculate and display the ecosystem benefits of the urban forest
- Engage the community in the care and maintenance of neighborhood trees
You can register for the March 8 webinar at https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/875138166.
If you can’t make the webinar, please contact me at dboyer@azavea.com or visit the OpenTreeMap website for more info. We’d love to hear what you think about OpenTreeMap!
Are you looking to optimize the crime analysis at your police department? This webinar will cover a series of 10 discrete steps that police departments can take to produce more effective crime analysis.
As we develop our crime analysis software, HunchLab, we are always on the look out for ways of examining and improving data quality as well as new academic research that shows promise to enhance crime analysis.
In this one-hour webinar, we will first explain some of the ways we examine data quality when we utilize historic incident datasets for research and analysis and how you can use these techniques in your department. Then, we will walk through a series of analytic techniques and practices that can help your department improve your crime analysis processes.
This session will cover analytic topics in a non-technical manner and outline techniques that require only free or commonly available software.
Registration link:
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/193960006
Police agencies collect a wealth of data. Every call for services and every incident of crime is captured and logged (and often automatically geocoded to a point in space). Making sense of this wealth of data is critical to police agencies being led by intelligence and analysis and not simply putting cops out into the field haphazardly.
Most police forces have a process whereby this raw information is groomed into maps by a central crime analysis unit. Determining where hotspots are present and describing recent events is definitely useful, but how can we accelerate this process to adapt our analytic output in nearly real-time and then disseminate this information to the field?
The answer is by automating the flow of information. We see this feature as a core strength within our product, HunchLab. New information is automatically pulled into HunchLab through integration with police agencies computer aided dispatch (CAD) and records management systems (RMS). This new information is then immediately incorporated into analytic output. New incidents can trigger early warning alerts for spikes in activity or modify short-term risk assessment in a particular police district. But it’s not just about consuming this information within HunchLab itself. The system provides secure access to analytic output via APIs that can be integrated into other back-end applications, further analytic tools, and even mobile applications.
To learn more about our vision for the real-time police force, you can watch the webinar recording embedded below:
