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In late July, Azavea sent David Zwarg to O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference in Portland, Oregon. While ‘Open Source’ has long been a buzzword in the information technology community, there is still some confusion about what it really means. For the loyal readers out there, you may remember Robert’s article in January of last year, describing what the heck ‘Open Source’ is, and how we’ve incorporated it into our workflow. For the rest of the readers, Open Source software is software that you can download, and build yourself, for free. Some have likened it to purchasing a car without the hood welded shut. This applies to the whole menagerie of software, from calculators to visualization toolkits.
David’s mission at the Open Source conference was to learn about the state-of-the-art in Open Source software, and bring back tasty nuggets of Open Knowledge. In particular, David attended a presentation by John Resig, the author of jQuery, and picked up a lot of great tips on creating robust JavaScript libraries, as well as a handful of other tricks that help along the way. He also picked up information on A/B testing as a way to hone website traffic conversions in a large-scale production site.
Some unexpected talks also included an Arduino workshop, and an Erlang workshop. In the former, participants turned their fancy laptops into etch-a-sketches, with the aid of microcontrollers and sensors. In the latter, a seasoned Erlang developer introduced the language, and discussed how it was used in massively parallel and robust applications.
All in all, it was an exciting conference, chock full of presentations and workshops relating to the myriad Open Source projects in software and hardware. The most exciting part of the conference was simply being in a community that was (and continues to be) so passionate and invested in making Open Source software world-class and accessible to everyone.
Recently Azavea went through another round of office expansion, almost doubling our office size. We knocked down walls, carved up new conference rooms, added a bike garage (as opposed to a bike tree), and more. We now have lots of new space, and quite a few new people. One of the questions that simmered while we watched the work complete was: where are we going to sit? Our staff is full of busy, smart, sophisticated people who can’t be bothered to do their own spatial analysis. Can’t we come up with some way to take the thinking out of this equation? In addition, this question is inherently spatial, so it sounded like a great opportunity to leverage our spatial research.
Map of Azavea’s office showing an employee’s ideal desk location based on entering weighted preferences in DecisionTree.The basic premise is that when individuals moved their desk, they will move toward something they desire, and away from something they don’t. If you are allergic to printer toner, you don’t want to sit next to the printers, and if you really like the sun, you definitely want to sit next to the windows. The ultimate location of an employee’s desk takes into account all sorts of factors, and comes to a solution that is often unique to the individual. Does this sound familiar? Indeed! Managing these types of decision factors is the basis for Azavea’s DecisionTree® framework.
Using these principles, it became apparent that software developer, David Zwarg’s research was well suited to address this problem. One of David’s ongoing research projects at Azavea is collaborating with Dana Tomlin at the University of Pennsylvania to develop an advanced raster cost-distance algorithm. The innovation behind this raster cost-distance algorithm is a wave propagation model, which is not constrained to the grid imposed on the raster data. Bonus!
To start, David picked some key landmarks in the new office, and generated a cost-distance raster for each of them. His list of raster datasets generated include: cost-distance to the refrigerator, cost-distance to the bike garage, cost-distance to the printers, cost-distance to the windows, and more. In all, there were 14 layers — or decision factors — that David was able to incorporate, based on the new office floor plan.
Next, he converted the raster datasets to the Azavea Raster Grid (ARG) format. What is this format, and why convert data from raster grids? ARG is a grid format that we use internally (not to be confused with “Argh!”, which is also used internally) and has been optimized for fast processing and storage speed, in addition to being the format used by DecisionTree.
Finally, David plugged the raster datasets into a demo DecisionTree application, and published the application on the Azavea Intranet a couple weeks prior to the completion of the office expansion. The application contains a base map that is the architectural floor plan of the new office space. Azavea staff members could now use DecisionTree to locate the places in the office that suited their preferences. Adjust a few sliders, click update, and the application shows the best place in the office, based on your criteria! No more guesswork required.
It’s exciting to see how our staff research bears fruit at unexpected times. Across the gamut, from Open Source projects to geoprocessing to pro-bono cartography, our staff research brings a wealth of experience to their work (and play) – who knows what will crop up next?
Early in the morning on August 4th, Robert and Megan happily joined the throngs of people descending on the San Diego Conference Center for the 2008 ESRI International User Conference. The annual event, with over 14,000 attendees, is chock full of presentations, technical workshops, and good times. We were particularly pleased to cheer for the City of Philadelphia, recipient of the 2008 President’s Award in recognition of its groundbreaking enterprise GIS applications.
Over the course of the week-long conference, we presented five of our clients’ projects including Asheville, NC’s Priority Places, the LandStat and Property Fraud applications for the Philadelphia Department of Records, an election incident mapping system designed for the Committee of Seventy, and lead a discussion of automated map development for analysis of campaign contribution origins, which touched on research by both Common Cause New York and MapLight.org.
As always, we enjoyed the opportunity to see the latest and greatest that ESRI and GIS users around the world have to offer, and look forward to applying what we’ve learned to future projects.
As some of you are perhaps aware, Azavea has spent a great deal of time developing ways to make advanced geographic technology more accessible to professionals who could benefit from its use. One of the ways we have done this is to create a framework for weighting geographic variables to aid in decision-making for a variety of practical uses, among them public health, economic development, and open space planning. We call this framework DecisionTree, and it has grabbed the attention of many professionals and academics who use geography on an everyday basis. Recently the federal government expressed their interest in the project, by awarding Azavea a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant. Through this prestigious grant from the United States Department of Agriculture, Azavea will perform research and development aimed at developing a DecisionTree application for use in rural economic development. Learn more about how we applied this framework to the City of Philadelphia using ESRI’s ArcGIS Server product to support urban economic development.
This project is supported by the Small Business Innovation Research program of the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES), Grant Number (2006-33610-16777).
Need a new blog to add to your favorites’ list? Each week Azavea interns highlight discoveries from the Philadelphia Department of Record’s PhillyHistory.org website in a new blog located at www.phillyhistory.org/blog. The blog contains weekly articles that bring alive photographs that showcase Philadelphia’s rich social and cultural history. They narrate the stories that lie behind these fascinating photographs, providing those interested with links to further resources. You can read entries from the blog, which was recently featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer Online, at www.phillyhistory.org/blog.
Azavea has been working in collaboration with the Philadelphia Department of Records developing the PhillyHistory.org website. The site includes a growing database of over 50,000 historic records, of which more than 15,000 have scanned images. The site’s GIS functionality enables users to locate photographs within a certain neighborhood, within a radius of an address, near a particular intersection, or by a place name like “City Hall.” One of the most important aspects of historical preservation is fostering interest in our past. Philadelphia is one of the most historic cities in the country, and we are proud to lend a hand in preserving its history for the enjoyment of generations to come.
Recognize the header image? The photo is from the www.phillyhistory.org website, taken in December 1906, the photography was titled ‘Compulsory Education-Newsboy.’ To read more about the image, check out the PhillyHistory.org blog, click here. You can also buy historic Philadelphia photographs taken since 1890 online at www.phillyhistory.org.
