Robert Cheetham | Azavea Journal

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Robert Cheetham

Winners Announced for Fix Philly Districts Contest

Vol. 6 Issue 5, October 2011

DistrictBuilder Logo Our Fix Philly Districts contest for redistricting the Philadelphia City Council closed at the end of August and we announced the prize winners on September 8. This project was a chance for us to use the DistrictBuilder software to apply pressure for change in our home town, Philadelphia.

Fix Philly Districts was a collaborative effort between several local organizations: WHYY NewsWorks, the Philadelphia Daily News, Philly.com, Penn Project for Civic Engagement and Azavea.. While the DistrictBuilder software had previously been used to support competitions in Virginia and Arizona, this Philadelphia implementation was the first time it was being used for a municipal public redistricting competition.

The competition ran for only a few weeks in August, but we were overwhelmed by the degree of engagement by the public. We had participants from all over the United States, and almost 500 people registered to use the application. More than 1,200 plans were started, and more than 70 complete plans were submitted to the leaderboards. The final competition garnered submissions from 31 teams or individuals. Representatives from each of the partners reviewed the submissions and selected several winners.

Did we have an impact?

This wasn’t a typical Azavea project: there was no funding to support it; all of the partners did the work pro bono; and while our Cicero API and the work we’ve done on DistrictBuilder is clearly engaged with the geographic elements of the democratic process, Azavea does not usually wade into the actual scrum of politics. Was it worth it? Did we have an impact?

Our ultimate goal would be to see the rules changed so that redistricting is taken out of City Council’s hands – I strongly believe that an independent process is the only way to ensure a fair and transparent process that reflects the public’s interests, rather than legislators’ interests. But we were not so naive as to believe that was going to happen because of our contest. Did we change the way that Council acted or change the outcome of the redistricting process? I think we did. In addition to pressuring council into scheduling three public hearings, they delivered a plan that was an improvement over the current one. But we did more than just place public pressure on council to be somewhat more responsible. We successfully demonstrated that, given some online tools, there are hundreds of people that are sufficiently interested in the redistricting process to commit hours of their time to drawing their own districts plans. And they did that in the middle of August, during a hurricane, several storms, an earthquake and anxiety about the Phillies.

The public process represented by the Fix Philly Districts contest demonstrates that many members of the public want to be engaged in a civic dialogue, both with their elected representatives and with each other. They will work hard to do so. And our democracy can be better for it.

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Azavea Sponsorships: THATCamp Philly, FOSS4G, & Apps4SEPTA

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 6 Issue 5, October 2011

Azavea was proud to be a sponsor for three events over the past few weeks. THATCamp Philly was a local version of the annual digital humanities conference. FOSS4G was the annual open source geospatial event, whose global peregrinations landed it in Denver this year. Apps4SEPTA is a local hack-a-thon (to be held Oct 8 and 9) aimed at creating apps that use data feeds from SEPTA, the Philadelphia regional transit agency. Each of these events represents a spirit of open collaboration between members of a community, and those are values we want to cultivate and support. Through our Sajara product and other projects, Azavea has been working with the digital humanities community for several years, and THATCamps are a way to make a contribution as well as learn from the regional humanities community. We are also both a consumer and contributor to several opens source geospatial projects, including OpenLayers and PostGIS, as well as our own DistrictBuilder and OpenTreeMap projects. FOSS4G is the vibrant annual gathering of people that share similar objectives. It has usually been held overseas, but the event in Denver was a great chance for several of our staff to engage with and learn from this community. And, since many of our staff use public transit, we share the love-hate relationship that many people have with their local transit agency, but we love the fact that SEPTA is making its data available through open APIs and want to do everything we can to support this.

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Azavea Supports Public Redistricting Competition in Philadelphia

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 6 Issue 4, August 2011

I’m excited to announce that this week we rolled out a new implementation of the DistrictBuilder software for our home town, Philadelphia. The new web site, FixPhillyDistricts.com, is the result of a collaborative effort between several local organizations: WHYY NewsWorks, the Philadelphia Daily News, Philly.c om , Penn Project for Civic Engagement, and Azavea. While the DistrictBuilder software has been used to support competitions in Virginia and Arizona, Fix Philly Districts will be the first time it’s being used for a municipal public redistricting competition.

This isn’t a typical Azavea project: there is no funding to support it – all of the partners are doing the work pro bono; and while our Cicero API and the work we’ve done on DistrictBuilder is clearly engaged with the geographic elements of the democratic process, Azavea does not usually wade into the actual scrum of politics.

So, why get involved? In 2006, using our Cicero database of global legislative districts, Azavea released the results of an internal research project on legislative district compactness in the form of a Gerrymandering White Paper. In 2010 we released a revised version of the research, this time in the context of the 2010 Census and the 2011 redistricting process. Both studies revealed that Azavea’s home town, Philadelphia, has some of the most contorted local council districts in the United States. We want to leverage the DistrictBuilder software we’ve been creating over the past year (in collaboration with leading redistricting experts at the Public Mapping Project) to make a contribution toward changing this poor showing.

In Philadelphia, the redistricting process is controlled by City Council. We believe that the best government is one in which citizens are engaged in the democratic process, and drawing the lines that determine how our representatives will be elected is a critical part of this process. We have created FixPhillyDistricts.com to both enable the public to learn about redistricting and to encourage public engagement in the process. The effort is also meant to demonstrate that an open, public process based upon objective criteria can produce fair, legal council districts in Philadelphia.

How can you help? Take a few minutes to visit FixPhillyDistricts.com. From there you can do two things: 1) you can create an account and draw a Philadelphia City Council district plan (even if you don’t live in Philadelphia); and 2) using the social media buttons available on the site, help the Fix Philly Districts partners tell other civic-minded organizations, researchers, and members of the public that web-based, collaborative and public redistricting is a reality that can be implemented in other cities, counties, and states. Together, we can redraw the map on redistricting.

Key Dates for Fix Philly Districts Competition

Wednesday, August 3, 2011 – Competition Opened
Thursday, August 11, 2011, 6:30pm (tonight) – DistrictBuilder Training Webinar - Register
Monday, August 15, 2011, 6:30pm – DistrictBuilder Training Webinar - Register
Sunday, August 28, 2011, 11:59pm – Competition Ends
Early September (TBD) – Winners Announced

More about Fix Philly Districts
We are really encouraged by the amount of press coverage the project has already received. You can see a roundup of local coverage in the Azavea News Room.

More about DistrictBuilder
DistrictBuilder – the software that powers the Fix Philly Districts site — was developed in collaboration with leading redistricting experts at the Public Mapping Project. It is open source, which means that the software is transparent and available to anyone to build their own redistricting web site. Azavea folks are also available should you be interested in an online redistricting project in your area. In collaboration with the Public Mapping Project, we will be continuing to add new features and capabilities over the next several months.

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OpenDataPhilly.org to Launch on April 25

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 6 Issue 2, April 2011

Open Data Philly Home

I’m excited to announce that we will be rolling out a new open data portal for the Philadelphia region, OpenDataPhilly.org on April 25. Open data and government transparency have been increasingly visible concerns over the past few years. Almost 10 years ago, the City of Philadelphia made its GIS data available to the public at no charge, and, at the time, was one of the first and largest municipalities in the world to do so. That data has been available on PASDA, the spatial data clearinghouse for Pennsylvania, ever since.

In the past few years, many municipal governments have been making a public and concerted effort to improve the transparency of their government operations by releasing significant and useful data sets. Washington DC deserves credit for playing a leadership role in this respect. DC was arguably the first major city to not only release downloadable data sets but create real-time streams of data from operational databases. Today the District provides access to 475 datasets from multiple agencies and in a variety of formats, CSV, RSS, KML, XML and shapefiles. In May 2009, the federal government launched Data.gov with just 47 data sets. Today there are 380,000 data sets (of which more than 376,000 are geospatial). Many other cities have followed suit. A few of them include:

But Philadelphia isn’t in that list. While the City was an early and unsung leader 10 years ago, these recent efforts by other governments have left it behind. There is no Philadelphia Open Data web site. So why is Azavea building one? Well, we really have Roz Duffy to thank. She encouraged me to get involved with the Open Access Philly task force, a group sponsored by the City. I attended my first meeting in January and was impressed by the range and diversity of the people who have been attending these meetings over the past year. After the first meeting, I felt like Azavea was actually in a good position to create something that would both serve to bring the various City data sets together in a single catalog as well as extend the catalog to other resources.

So while the Open Access Philly task force is supporting this new catalog, OpenDataPhilly.org is not a City project. The City government doesn’t have the resources to build something right now. But I’m proud that Azavea is building it. That said, this is not a typical project for us. We don’t build open data portals – we build spatial data analysis and visualization tools. But I felt this was important for a number of reasons. First, I kept hearing other technology people in the region lamenting how Philadelphia was being left in the dust by other cities. That’s sad because there’s actually far more data available than most people realize, but that was certainly a common perception. Second, much of Azavea’s work depends on open standards and the broad availability of useful data sets. By making it easier to find data, we are supporting the ecosystem that supports our business. Third, I buy into the idea that open government can encourage both better government and a more engaged citizenry.

Because Azavea is not the City, OpenDataPhilly.org is different from most other open government data portals. We have taken a look at a lot of them and we’ve done our best to incorporate what we thought were the best parts. But we’ve decided to try some different ideas that we hope will make the catalog more useful. First, the catalog is not limited to data from the municipal government – we have also incorporated data from non-profits, universities and commercial organizations. Second, this catalog is not just about data; we’ve also included data-centric web and mobile applications as well as developer-oriented APIs and other structured data feeds. Third, we realize that data for its own sake is not really all that helpful. To be useful, the data needs to actually be put to use in new applications, visualizations and stories. So the OpenDataPhilly.org site includes an Idea Gallery, a feature similar to London’s Inspirational Uses page.

Open Data Philly When the site rolls out on Monday, it will not only be a catalog of existing data sets, applications and APIs, it will also include a series of new geodata APIs that the City has implemented over the last few weeks. So the act of constructing the catalog has inspired the City to release some data sets in a new and useful way. That’s pretty exciting. From our perspective, that means the effort is already a success. Furthermore, while the City didn’t pay for the development of OpenDataPhilly.org, that doesn’t mean they didn’t help. Several staff at the City’s Office of Information Technology, including Jeff Friedman, Stuart Alter, Paul Wright, Jim Querry, Brian Ivey, Walter Svekla and others have supported it’s development through both encouragement, suggestions and the hard work required to roll out these new APIs.

The rollout will also coincide with Philly Tech Week, a week-long celebration of technology and innovation in Philadelphia organized by Technically Philly. Open data serves as bookends for the week. Azavea will be rolling out OpenDataPhilly.org on Monday at noon at WHYY. On Saturday as part of the BarCamp NewsInnovation at Temple University, Tropo is organizing an Open Government Hackathon. The Hackathon will aim to build new applications that use the data listed in the catalog.

Want to get involved? Here are a few ways:

Show up on Saturday for the Hackathon and join a team.
Got data? We know we probably missed a bunch of useful data sets. There will be a mechanism for organizations to submit information about their data sets for potential inclusion in the catalog.
Is a critical data set missing? We’ll have a way for you to ask for it and vote on other people’s requests.
Write to your city, state and federal legislators and ask them to support open government data policies. We can help you with that too. Check out Azavea’s Cicero API.
If you are a developer, build some apps that use the data. Or, better yet, apply for Code for America, an innovative approach to public service where you can apply your skills to making government work better for everyone.
Say something with the data. Download some data and develop a beautiful visualization that tells a story. Then submit it to the Idea Gallery.

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Esri Announces New Non-Profit Software Program

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 5 Issue 4, September 2010

Azavea has worked with many non-profit organizations over the years. Many of these organizations struggle with unstable funding, limited technology infrastructure and many other challenges. In our society, we honor these organizations with tax-free status and other benefits. Over many years, a practice of offering low cost products to non-profit organizations has slowly grown among leading software companies. In the GIS world, Esri has been a leader. The company has offered software grants to countless organizations, particularly non-profits focused on conservation and Native American tribes. And for many years, Esri has offered generous pricing for students and teachers. A couple of years ago, Esri began a partnership with Techsoup to provide free desktop software licenses, training and books to any non-profit.

At the Gov 2.0 Summit this week, Jack Dangermond doubled down. He announced that Esri will offer a new non-profit program whereby qualified organizations can request up to 75 seats of ArcGIS Desktop and 2 seats of ArcGIS Server software per organization. For larger organizations non-profits, Esri will also offer four levels of a special nonprofit organization enterprise license agreement (ELA). Both ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server software include all extensions.

That’s a lot of software. If you are a non-profit organization and haven’t taken them up on it yet, you should think about it.

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What the Heck is… GPU?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 5 Issue 3, July 2010

workers

Most of us know that CPU or “central processing unit” is the brains of our laptops, workstations, servers, and smart phones. As games and other 3D applications have grown in popularity, a specialized processor known as the “graphics processing unit” or GPU has become more important. GPUs are the chips that perform the math and geometry calculations necessary to render the 3D scenes in a game or render the battle scenes and animate Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies.

The power of CPUs has continued to grow at extraordinary rates since the 1960’s, enabling devices that are faster, smaller, lighter, and more powerful. Despite this accelerating computing power, however, we have found that many types of analytical tasks – from calculating the effects of climate change on sea level rise to calculating walksheds – remain too costly (in terms of computing time) to be run on the web with more than a small number of users. In 2006, we began attacking this performance and scaling problem with the development of our DecisionTree platform. Originally designed for supporting business siting and real estate decisions, DecisionTree optimized the performance of each calculation by breaking it up into small chunks, distributing the work amongst several “workers” and then reassembling the results. This “distributed computing” approach worked for this particular scenario, and we are now able to perform a calculation that previously required several seconds in 500 milliseconds or less, enabling the development of software like the City of Asheville’s Priority Places.

GPUs enable us to potentially extend this approach. The CPU in a contemporary laptop or workstation may have two or perhaps even four “cores”. However, while multi-core CPUs are a relatively recent development, GPUs have been multi-core for many years – a contemporary GPU processor may have 250, 500 or even 1,000 cores on a single chip. While these GPU cores are smaller, simpler and tightly focused on the mathematical calculations used for rendering images, a few years ago some scientists got the idea that they might be able to hijack all those cores to perform certain types of scientific computing tasks more rapidly by breaking up the work and performing it on all of those hundreds of GPU cores at once. Thus was born General Purpose computing for GPUs or “GPGPU”. GPU computing is transforming medical imaging, fluid dynamics, and other fields that can take advantage of this type of capability.

Using GPUs is not a straightforward task. In order to use all of those cores, we frequently need to completely re-think a given algorithm. For the past six months, with support from the National Science Foundation’s SBIR program, we have been developing GPU versions of several Map Algebra operations aimed at testing the feasibility of using GPUs to make radical improvements in the speed of raster GIS processing. We have made good progress with some operations accelerated more than 75 times. We are not the only ones thinking about this, and we are incredibly excited about the potential to have a big impact on the responsiveness and scalability of GIS applications.

If you are interested in learning more about the technical details of working with GPUs, check out David Zwarg’s 6-part series on GPU computing in the Azavea Labs blog. What new GIS applications do you think will be made possible with GPUs? If you have some ideas, get in touch.

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Avencia Has A New Name: Meet….Azavea

By Rachel Cheetham-Richard and Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 5 Issue 1, March 2010

breakingnews

Dear Friends,

Welcome to a new edition of the Azavea Journal. Did I say Azavea? Yes. Some of you might have already heard the news from the letter we sent out last Wednesday, but Avencia will now be known as Azavea – pronounced like ‘azalea’. There is no particularly good reason for this, and this was not a change that we sought – we liked our name just fine. So what happened?

Avencia became the target of a trademark dispute that sought to have our registered trademark canceled 3 years ago. While neither company has ever had any experience with a customer demonstrating confusion between the two names, the other party has persisted in their effort. We have vigorously defended ourselves since then but now taking it to its conclusion in federal court will be even more distracting and expensive. I have therefore decided to end the dispute in order to preserve the financial health of our firm and to focus on our company’s mission and commitment to impeccable service for our clients.

So what does Azavea mean? My brother-in-law is from Pakistan. While we were brainstorming for a new name, he mentioned that ‘zavea’ means ‘perspective’ in Urdu. We liked the sound of it and its evident connection to geography. So after a few spelling tweaks to enable us to create a strong trademark, we adopted Azavea.

While we have a new name, the company’s mission remains the same. We will continue to perform research and create software that brings together the best aspects of geography and the web. We remain committed to providing our clients access to advanced geospatial technologies through highly-crafted and easy-to-use web and mobile solutions, and personalized geospatial analysis services. Our goal remains to combine our experience solving tough geospatial problems, commitment to tailored service, and a genuine desire to “do well by doing good” in order to help our clients create more dynamic, vibrant, and sustainable communities.

We are proud of our team for sticking through the ups and downs of this trademark dispute and have valued their input throughout this 3-year process. We are grateful to work with smart people who get a kick out of working on projects with social value, and who are passionate about making a difference in the world around them.

Some of these projects are highlighted in the articles below. Enjoy, and again, welcome to a new edition of the Azavea Journal.

Sincerely,
Robert Cheetham
President & CEO

PS: Please note that none of our contact information has changed, except for our email addresses and website that now reflect the new name. For instance, my new email address is cheetham@azavea.com .

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Conference Report: 10th Crime Mapping Research Conference (CMRC)

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 4 Issue 4, September 2009

CrimeMappingConferenceLogo The 10th Crime Mapping Research Conference was held August 19 – 22, 2009 in New Orleans. The CMRC is organized every one to two years by the Mapping and Analysis for Public Safety (MAPS) office in the National Institute of Justice. The CMRC brings together academic researchers, crime analysts and command staff to review the state of the art in geographic analysis and visualization of crime. This was a lively group with a number of high quality talks and workshops, and a strong series of research-oriented presentations. While sponsored by the NIJ in the U.S. Dept. of Justice, attendees included folks from Japan, Turkey, Canada, and the UK.

While there were several interesting presentations, I would like to highlight four that I particularly enjoyed:

I attended two presentations by Dr. Elizabeth Groff, a Professor of Criminal Justice at Temple University. In her keynote address, she suggested that while our ability to visualize crime patterns has steadily improved, there is a difference between information and “actionable” information, and, as a community, we need to be creating more tools that are aimed at generating actionable intelligence. She set out several examples of what this might look like in different operational contexts. I was very proud that one of her examples was Azavea’s prototype for HunchLab, the Crime Spike Detector currently in use at the Philadelphia Police Department. Dr. Groff also did a fascinating presentation introducing the use of Agent-based Modeling and how this simulation technique can be applied to modeling geographic patterns of criminal behavior.

Hunchlab_points_heatmap

Dr. Wilpen Gorr, from Carnegie Mellon University, presented a paper on Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) for Hot Spot Analysis. ROC was a technique originally developed for analyzing radar signals and has since been used in medical imaging, but crime analysis is a novel application. He has been working with the technique to calibrate kernel density smoothing as well as to use leading indicators to create predictive analytics for particular classes of crime.

Jerry Ratcliffe, a colleague of Liz Goff at Temple University, also did multiple presentations. The one I attended was on a pattern his team has been researching, called the “near repeat” effect. He has demonstrated that for some crimes, like burglary, there is a “contagion” effect that raises the likelihood of a repeat crime occurring near the original crime within a short period of time after the event. His work does not end with a research paper – he has built some helpful software tools to help calculate the extent of the effect.

In summary, this was a terrific event, and I have to commend the Director of MAPS, Ron Wilson, and his colleagues for creating an excellent forum for exchanging ideas.

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ESRI Business Partner Conference and Developer Summit Review

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 4 Issue 2, May 2009

"As a business partner that primarily does web-based software development, these events [ESRI Business Partner Conference and Developer Summit] are pretty important to us"

Every year, Azavea makes the trip out to Palm Springs, California to attend the ESRI Business Partner Conference and Developer Summit. As a business partner that primarily does web-based software development, we consider these events pretty important for us, so I wanted to outline what we regard as some of the highlights of the event.

These two conferences were primarily about the forthcoming release of ArcGIS 9.3.1. While this is an interim release before version 9.4 goes into beta testing this fall, it incorporates a number of features that we think are important:

ArcGIS Server
ArcGIS Server will receive several improvements, most of which are focused on performance and developer tools. They include:

Performance – Dramatically improved performance for dynamic mapping services. Cached map services will still be the faster way to provide maps on the web, but a new, optimized rendering engine as well as several tools for troubleshooting and resolving performance issues should have a substantial impact.
Licensing
- Map editing features will now be included in ArcGIS Server Standard edition as well as in the Advanced edition.
- Analytical extensions (Spatial Analyst, 3D Analyst and Network Analyst) will now be included in the Advanced edition without having to purchase separate licenses.
- The Web ADF will no longer require a separate license if it is hosted on a separate server.
Developer API’s – New versions of the Javascript API and Flex API will be joined by a new Silverlight API, which is already in beta testing.
Templates – ESRI will released updated versions and a broader range of templates to help people get started more quickly with the various API’s

ArcGIS Online
The ArcGIS Online system will see several substantial extensions to its functionality including:

Upload your own data – ArcMap will be able to export ‘Layer Packages’ that combine data and cartography and can be uploaded to ArcGIS Online and used in conjunction with cached base maps hosted there. You will also have the option of setting limits on who can find and use the data you store on ArcGIS Online.
Low cost Web Map API – Will provide a set of base maps and basic geoprocessing capabilities for organizations that do not need all of the functionality in ArcGIS Server.
Personalization – Save favorite data sets, create your own mashups, upload layer packages, share data, and perform other activities from your account.
More data and services – ESRI has negotiated some new agreements to provide data sets from Microsoft Virtual Earth, DeLorme, and other providers. It will also be rolling out commercial versions of its geocoding and routing services.

While not a "major" release, the focus on performance and flexibility will make this a compelling upgrade for many organizations. If you have any questions about how you might be able to leverage these new capabilities, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

ESRI will be holding a series of half-day seminars on Creating Effective Web Maps through June 9. These events are a great way to learn more about the new capabilities in the ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 release.

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What the Heck is … Cloud Computing?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 4 Issue 1, February 2009

"Cloud Computing...got started several years ago with attempts to engage global networks of PC's into large-scale science problems"

From L to R: Amazon Web Services, Google AppEngine and Microsoft’s Azure Services offer some of the leading cloud computing platforms.

In the beginning, computers were devices that filled rooms and whole buildings. They slowly shrank in size until, in the 1980′s, computing underwent a revolution, bringing Apple Macs and IBM PC’s to our desks. In the 1990′s, we began to connect all those personal computers to each other using the internet, creating a global network of computers. We are now in the midst of another revolution. The current transformation is again returning computing power back to machines that fill rooms and even entire warehouses, but this time, instead of a single computer filling that space, there are thousands of them filling data centers run by new, old and unexpected companies. These new data centers are being used to create a ‘cloud’ of network-accessible services and have recently been rebranded with the latest buzzword (at Azavea, we always seek to be fully buzzword-compliant) as ‘cloud computing’.

DecisionTree geographic calculation tools running on the Amazon cloud computing
services will enable you to run high performance geographic calculators without requiring your own infrastructure.

Cloud computing has actually been around for a while. Even before the internet, networked computers that could break up many tasks into small chunks were said to be engaged in ‘distributed computing‘ or, more recently, ‘grid computing‘. Cloud computing is the same concept applied to internet-connected computers. It really got started several years ago with attempts to engage global networks of PC’s into large-scale science problems. The SETI@home project enabled people to contribute their idle PC’s computing power toward examining radio signals for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Similar projects for insight into protein folding diseases, decryption and the Large Hadron Collider for processing LHC experiments have been joined by global networks of spammers and hackers who manage thousands of compromised computers to form ‘botnets’ that are used to attack government computer systems or blackmail companies.

Aside from those bent on curing cancer or instigating global mayhem, contemporary cloud computing efforts are frequently aimed at more modest objectives. Amazon.com, the retailer, is one of the leaders in this field. What began as a way for Amazon to sell unused capacity in its data centers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now an entire suite of reusable services being leveraged for all sorts of activities that have nothing to do with selling books and movies. The AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) is an online data storage service. The AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) enables software developers to create ‘virtual’ computers running Linux or Windows that can be applied to any computing task. Other AWS services include credit card transactions, message queues, web search, and order fulfillment. AWS has been joined by similar services at Google and a new Microsoft effort called Azure.

Many cloud computing providers provide dashboards displaying system availability.

Now imagine you are a small company that has a new idea that will require lots of computer servers. Before AWS and other services, you would have purchased your own servers and built a data center. Now, you can skip all that hassle by hosting your new idea on an infrastructure maintained at a much lower cost by Amazon, Google or Microsoft. These services are priced like your electricity and gas — you pay by the unit of storage, computing time or other metric. So as you need more capacity, you fire up another virtual server, but you only pay for what you use.

So what does cloud computing mean for geospatial services? Cloud-based geospatial services are already common. The API’s for GoogleMaps, Yahoo!Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and ESRI ArcGIS Online systems already provide some basic map display, geocoding, routing and other geospatial information services as hosted services. While none of these are based on the metered pricing that Amazon offers, I’m confident this type of business model is coming. A new company, Cloudmade, is focused on creating commercial services that leverage the OpenStreetMap database.

At Azavea, our cloud computing work has focused on two of our services: Cicero and DecisionTree. To learn more about Dave Felcan’s research project on the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), read his article below.

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What the Heck is … OpenStreetMap?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 6, December 2008

"Inspired by collaborative information commons such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap is an editable map of the whole world..."

Mumbai as documented in OpenStreetMap.

In the United States, we have a general policy of the federal government sharing useful data with the public. This policy has led to open distribution of geospatial data sets that include the Census Bureau’s TIGER line file, USGS topographic maps, aerial photography, land cover and elevation, a plethora of NASA imagery and even several global data sets developed by the military. This overall openness has been replicated by many U.S. cities and states as well.

While Canada and Australia have a similar legal tradition to the U.S. and some government GIS data is available, most developed countries in Europe and around the world make little or no geospatial data available to the public. In the United Kingdom, the Ordnance Survey maintains the most comprehensive and high quality national GIS database in the world, but the data is only available to the public for a steep licensing fee. In the developing world, data is either not distributed due to national security concerns or simply does not exist.

With the Census Bureau’s TIGER data as a starting point, private companies in the United States began building high quality base maps for commercial sale. These companies have grown and consolidated until there are only a small number that dominate the market, and the two largest, TeleAtlas and NavTeq, are now held by consumer electronics firms. These companies maintain global data sets, but the cost of licensing them is substantial.

It is within this environment of high costs and limited access to data that a project called OpenStreetMap began in the U.K. Inspired by collaborative information commons such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap is an editable map of the whole world, which is being built largely from scratch using GPS traces and other personal surveys. It is released with an open content license and available for free to anyone that wishes to use it. The project is a combination of software, data and knowledge. A variety of software tools have been developed to support online and off-line editing of the map data as well as its maintenance and distribution. A wiki is used to organize information about standards and processes.

Copenhagen as documented in OpenStreetMap.

Like other open data projects, such as Wikipedia or the Human Genome Project , the effort is not perfect. For example, there is not yet a standard mechanism for storing the data necessary to perform geocoding and routing; the concept of place name aliases is relatively weak; there is no formalized review process to identify and eliminate deliberate vandalism; the spatial data model is limited to points and lines; and while there are standards for what are valid attributes for each feature, they are not enforced, so the implementation of data elements is not yet very consistent. Nonetheless, the effort is growing rapidly and improving with time. There are now thousands of people building the map in almost every part of the world, and the size of the global database (known as ‘the planet file’) is now doubling every six months.

OpenStreetMap is a compelling example of how the power of loosely organized collective action can be brought to bear to create sophisticated new knowledge resources. In some parts of the world, OpenStreetMap is now more comprehensive than what is commercially available, and it will doubtless continue to develop. Azavea staff are both contributing to the database and exploring new ways to leverage the resulting map. If you would like to participate in its development, there are a number of resources online that will help you learn how. If you live in Philadelphia and would like to help improve the map, I’m organizing a Meetup in January and you are invited!

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What the Heck is … ArcGIS Server?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 5, October 2008

"ArcGIS... enables access to the entire basket of GIS analysis capability included in the ArcObjects component framework."

Azavea was founded to build web-based software tools that support geographic analysis. For the past seven years, most of these applications have been based on the ESRI ArcIMS platform. ArcIMS was designed for map display and geographic queries and it does this well, but, apart from visualization, geocoding and routing, the platform’s analytical capability is limited. As ArcIMS has evolved, ESRI has also been steadily extending the analytical capability of its flagship ArcGIS platform, but these capabilities were largely inaccessible from ArcIMS.

ArcGIS Server (AGS) changes all of that. It enables access to the entire basket of GIS analysis capability included in the ArcObjects component framework. For the first time, it also packages the full capabilities of a geographic database, ArcSDE, with the map serving and analysis capabilities. In other words, it is a complete platform for server-based geographic analysis and visualization.

City of Philadelphia, Department of Records’ ParcelExplorer application, developed by Azavea using ArcGIS Server.

What do I mean by analysis? Well, anything that you can do with Spatial Analyst, toolboxes, ArcObjects and the modeling and geoprocessing platform can now be done on the server including: Map Algebra (for raster analysis); feature calculations such as merge, dissolve, buffer and intersect; routing; geographic searches; and models (sequences of processing steps that answer a question or transform a data set). And ArcGIS Server is not just about analysis. It enables you to publish maps on the web with the cartographic flexibility that you have with ArcMap and even supports digitizing and editing of map features. Finally, it is packaged with a set of software development tools that make building compelling web applications easier and faster.

With the release of ArcGIS Server 9.3, Azavea has seen substantial performance improvements as well as the release of new and powerful toolkits such as REST, Javascript and Flex API’s that support the rapid development of responsive and lightweight web applications.

ESRI will continue to support ArcIMS for a few years, but will not develop the platform further. All new R&D will be rolled into this ArcGIS Server product, so this is the platform for the future. Do you have questions about ArcGIS Server? Don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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‘Locating Memory’ by Wil Lindsay: An Art Exhibit that’s Worth Being Put on the Map

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 5, October 2008

"...'Locating Memory' is an interesting project that integrates a hacked GPS-based memory-locating apparatus with the experiences and memory of participating individuals"

GPS Prototype

Azavea is proud to announce that we will be sponsoring an art exhibit by Wil Lindsay, a Philadelphia-based electronic media artist, to be held November 14 – December 28, 2008 at the Esther M. Klein Art Gallery at the Science Center in University City.

Supporting an exhibit is a first for us, but ‘Locating Memory’ is an interesting project that integrates a hacked GPS-based memory-locating apparatus with the experiences and memory of participating individuals. Events experienced by participants will be cataloged and represented in the gallery space as an interactive multimedia installation. The exhibit is being held in partnership with The Hacktory, a local non-profit organization that promotes the use of technology in the arts. ‘Locating Memory’ is a collaboration between Lindsay and the participants of an electronics and programming workshop held at The Hacktory. Workshop attendees built their own programmable GPS receiver (a ‘GPS-A-Sketch’), learned about GPS communications, how to collect data with a receiver as well as create and play location-based games. Using the GPS-A-Sketch they created, the participants are contributing their experiences and memories they capture with the device as the raw data for Lindsay’s installation. Wil Lindsay is currently the artist-in-residence at The Hacktory, which promotes the use of technology in the arts through classes, community events, and shared facilities.

So check out the exhibit in the Esther M. Klein Art Gallery at 3600 Market Street in Philadelphia. The gallery will be open Monday through Saturday, 9am – 5pm, November 14 – December 28. The opening reception will be Friday, November 14, 5pm – 8pm.

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What is PhillyStat?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 4, August 2008

"... what really gets us jazzed is the central role that GIS and statistics play in the [PhillyStat] process."

Beginning in the mid-1990′s, the New York Police Department, under William Bratton, Jack Maple and John Timoney, created a system that became known as CompStat, short for ‘computer statistics’. Under this program, precinct commanders met on a regular basis with the NYPD executive team to review statistics and conditions in their precincts. Despite the name, in some sense, CompStat had nothing to do with computing. It was an organizational management tool for law enforcement agencies. The key innovations were measurement of results, regular review, and relentless follow-up. All of these activities were directed at performance and accountability with lower levels of crime being the key performance metrics. But computing, and GIS in particular, played an important role. GIS software had become sufficiently inexpensive and easy to use that it could be run on desktop PC’s. Maps and stats became the mechanism by which the results would both be measured and reviewed. CompStat would become inextricably associated with mapping and GIS.

The results were spectacular. Over the course of several years, New York City saw dramatic drops in crime. Obviously, this could not all be attributed to CompStat – there were many factors – but the idea was conceptually simple and clearly brought results, setting the stage for its replication in other parts of the country. When Bratton, Maple, and Timoney left the NYPD, they took the program to Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, and it was quickly picked up by other cities. Baltimore took the process one step further, extending the performance management concept to all municipal agencies to create CitiStat. Similar programs now exist in Chicago, Washington DC, San Francisco, and dozens of other cities. In 2006 Washington DC added an important innovation: live data feeds for much of its operations. Why was this important? Good government is frequently related to the degree of transparency provided to the public. DC took a huge leap toward greater transparency by making its actual operational information freely available to all.

Philadelphia’s new Mayor, Michael Nutter, made implementation of a CitiStat program a key part of his election campaign and began implementing the concept within weeks of taking office. PhillyStat was launched in March.

Why does Azavea care? Well, there’s obviously the abstract sense that our tax dollars are being more effectively spent and that these efforts may eventually result in better city services. But what really gets us jazzed is the central role that GIS and statistics play in the process. The meetings are open to the public, and having now attended a couple of the PhillyStat meetings, I am amazed by the range of maps and data being used to more effectively communicate and collaborate. People are not just making maps of crime, but using aggregated maps of deeds and mortgages to examine the impact of foreclosures, examining the changing geographic patterns real estate tax to understand how the real estate market is changing in each neighborhood. Having just rolled out the new public crime mapping application in Philadelphia, I’m also looking forward to seeing the PhillyStat data made available to the public.

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ESRI President’s Award 2008 Awarded to City of Philadelphia’s MOIS GIS Applications

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 4, August 2008

"The President's Award ... is a special recognition to an organization that is "a model for others to follow in implementing GIS successfully as well as making a positive impact on the environment and society."

Jim Querry of Division of Technology accepts award from President Jack Dangermond

At the ESRI User Conference earlier this month, the City of Philadelphia was presented with the President’s Award by Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI. The President’s Award is given to one organization each year and is a special recognition by Mr. Dangermond to an organization that is “a model for others to follow in implementing GIS successfully as well as making a positive impact on the environment and society.” Previous winners have included the U.S. Department of the Interior, the City of New York, the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, and the Hong Kong Information Center. Though the award is seldom given to the same recipient twice, this is the second time the City of Philadelphia has received the award (the last time was in 2000).

The award was accepted by Jim Querry, the Director of Enterprise GIS for the City. The award was presented in the Plenary Session of the annual ESRI User Conference in San Diego before a crowd of more than 12,000. Several efforts were cited including: the public crime mapping web site, PhillyHistory, the work order management system at the Streets Department, a new mobile GIS system at the Airport, the Unified Land Record System, CityMaps and ParcelExplorer. We’re happy and proud that some of Azavea’s work was part of this recognition for the innovative GIS work being done by the City of Philadelphia.

To read more about the award ceremony visit the ESRI User Conference blog here.

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DecisionTree Used by the City of Asheville to Enhance Its Economic Development Efforts

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 3, June 2008

"... generate a 'hot spot' or 'heat' map displaying the
locations that best match your selected factors ... business siting and real estate... resource allocation,
conservation planning, and risk analysis."

DecisionTree® is Azavea’s new web-based solution for geographic prioritization. It enables a web site visitor to select a series of ‘decision factors’, assign weights to those factors, and then generate a ‘hot spot’ or ‘heat’ map displaying the locations that best match the visitor’s selected factors and weights. DecisionTree was created to support business siting and real estate decisions, but it can be applied to many types of prioritization, including resource allocation, conservation planning, and risk analysis.

We haven’t written much about our DecisionTree technology yet as it is still a project under active design and development, but the technology is now far enough along that we are able to begin deploying it for our clients. The City of Asheville in North Carolina is the first such implementation. They were seeking to implement a new application, Priority Places, to support economic development and job creation by providing tools and data that could assist businesses with finding the best site, and the DecisionTree solution seemed like it might be good fit.

Asheville took a bit of a risk when they signed on with us. We had completed a first cut of the server software, but it was not a fully functional software package yet – there were no user interface, no administrative tools and so on. However, for us, it has been really terrific to have a real-world set of users who are willing to provide ongoing suggestions and feedback as we are building the software. In many ways, DecisionTree development has been heavily guided and influenced by Asheville, making us more focused and productive as we develop the product and, hopefully, making the final product more useful.

While our work with raster-based geospatial modeling stretches back for several years and the ideas for the DecisionTree software are not new, the underlying server technology is fairly new and is based on an R&D grant we received from the US Department of Agriculture (#2006-33610-16777). I’ve written about Map Algebra and Geospatial Models in previous newsletters, but raster-based weighted overlay applications such as this are a concrete use of this type of technology.

You can check out this early version of the DecisionTree technology at the Priority Places web site. This version of the software uses the Adobe Flex technology for the user interface, so you’ll need to have Flash installed. You can create an account if you want to save your work or click on the ‘Enter Site as Guest’ button if you just want to take it for a test drive.

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What the Heck Is … PostGIS?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 3, June 2008

Every Azavea project has some kind of database components. Most of Azavea’s early projects used commercial databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or Microsoft Access. I am a particular fan of SQL Server. Its low price point is paired with high performance and sophisticated features such as OLAP and data mining.

However, there are some terrific open source alternatives as well. PostgreSQL is one that we have been using increasingly over the past year. PostgreSQL is an advanced relational database engine with support for stored procedures, full-text indexing, sub-queries, replication and (yeah!) geospatial data. The GIS support is provided by a project called PostGIS. The founders and lead maintainers of the project are developers at Refractions Research, a small company based in Victoria, British Columbia. PostGIS extends the core PostgreSQL database engine by adding support for geographic objects, including the ability to execute geographic queries using simple SQL. Put another way, it ‘spatially enables’ the PostgreSQL database.

Example of a PostGIS enabled database.

We have used PostgreSQL and PostGIS on several new projects including The Root and the Election Incidents Tracking and Mapping application we built for the Committee of 70 (previous article), with more waiting in the wings. We’re also pleased to see that with ArcGIS 9.3, ESRI will also be adding support for PostgreSQL in the ArcSDE component of the ArcGIS Server platform.
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What the Heck is…OpenLayers?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 2, April 2008

"[OpenLayers] is a good example of how open source software can support and extend commerical software in a positive way."

As you’ve just read, we rolled out a new feature in Sajara – we changed the map search feature from a custom component that Azavea had built to an open source tool called OpenLayers. OpenLayers is a toolkit that was originally developed by MetaCarta, but they gave it away to the public (nice people!) and it has since gathered quite a following. What is it? It’s a Javascript library that makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. Furthermore, it does not rely on any particular map server technology and will work equally well with ESRI ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server, UMN MapServer, GeoServer and even GoogleMaps or Microsoft Virtual Earth. OpenLayers does not actually generate the maps – you still need a map server to do that – but it provides a simple and intuitive interface for interacting with map data. In the case of Sajara, we are using it with ESRI ArcIMS and the WMS Connector generating the map images.

Example of how OpenLayers can be used with baselayers from GoogleMaps in the genealogy mapping tool we created for the Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive’s ‘The Root’.

Why did we add OpenLayers to Sajara? The short answer was that we wanted to be able to support multiple map servers in order to give our clients more flexibility, but by incorporating an open source toolkit like this, we are also leveraging the thousands of hours of time invested by a global community of developers. While it is evolving rapidly (meaning that we get new functionality ever few months), it is a well-tested and responsive set of components. It also has two sister projects called TileCache and FeatureServer that add some additional capabilities.

Our initial foray with OpenLayers has been very positive. We have used it in some of our pro bono projects as well as work for other clients, and we are now testing it for potential future use in DecisionTree and Kaleidocade. It is a good example of how open source software can support and extend commercial software in a positive way.

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Tracking the Fraud-ulators with GIS

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 1, February 2008

"...it will be an important new tool for the City, legal professionals, and law enforcement to fight property fraud."

Photo courtesy of PhillyHistory.org, a project of the City of Philadelphia Department of Records.

As if declining home sales, a credit squeeze and predatory lending practices were not enough, there has been a substantial rise in mortgage and deed fraud throughout the boom and bust of the real estate market. While this trend has been most apparent in the hottest real estate markets, Philadelphia’s homeowners have not been spared from this crime. The methods run the gamut from simple to complex, seemingly innocent to downright treacherous. But the outcome of what is known as ‘property conveyance fraud’ is often the same — a homeowner is bilked out of their equity or the deed to their home. The City of Philadelphia has been combating this phenomenon with a multi-agency task force organized by the Philadelphia Bar Association. The Property Conveyance Task Force is an ad hoc committee of City agencies, law enforcement officials, title insurance companies, non-profit legal assistance organizations, and the district attorney’s office. The group meets every few months to discuss and share information on fraud schemes and develop strategies for detecting and mitigating the damage.

The task force has made progress in terms of developing strategies, but the most serious impediment remains the lack of information available to all members of the group. Azavea was asked by the City’s Department of Records — where deeds and mortgages are recorded as legal documents — to help develop a GIS-enabled fraud tracking system. The result is a set of web-based tools that use ESRI’s ArcIMS map server and the City’s web services API’s to enable all members of the task force to register fraud reports, search the results, and subscribe to geographic alerts. While it will not be available to the general public, it will be an important new tool for the City, legal professionals and law enforcement to fight property fraud.

If you are interested in learning more about the effects of property conveyance fraud, there was a series of articles in the New York Times last year that may prove interesting:

“Mortgage Fraud Is Up, but Not in Their Backyards“

“New Scheme Preys on Desperate Homeowners”

“Fraud Cases Are Rising, F.B.I. Says”

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What the Heck is…Map Algebra?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 1, February 2008

"...Map Algebra provides a vocabulary and conceptual framework for classifying ways to combine map data to produce new maps."

I have written before about GIS models, toolboxes and geoprocessing. But long before those concepts and products existed, many of us interacted with GIS software through a command-line interface. These command line interfaces were quite different from one product to the next. But for those of us who started out with raster processing after 1990 (I learned my first GIS concepts using the command line version of Idrisi) there was a unifying language that we could use to describe the various functions and processes: Map Algebra.

Developed through the 1980′s by Professor C. Dana Tomlin as part of his PhD thesis work, Map Algebra provides a vocabulary and conceptual framework for classifying ways to combine map data to produce new maps. While primarily applied to raster data sets (GRID and image data), the same concepts can be applied to many types of cartographic information, and it has since been extended by Dr. Tomlin and others to 3D, time and other domains. People use Map Algebra for a broad array of applications including: suitability modeling, surface analysis, density analysis, statistics, hydrology, landscape ecology, real estate, and geographic prioritization. Azavea has used Map Algebra on several projects and it is at the heart of our DecisionTree product.

What does it look like? Usually, Map Algebra can be expressed as text – for example, one might add several maps of rainfall like this: Rain_total = Rain_April + Rain_May + Rain_June, but it also lends itself to graphical flow charts like those in the ModelBuilder application.

Map Algebra is organized into four major groups of operations – local, focal (or neighborhood), zonal, and incremental. Each of these operations combines maps or transforms map data to create a new map. Part of the elegance of Map Algebra operations is based on the idea that all operations result in a new map. This makes it easy to group and string functions together into larger models. While there are different flavors of Map Algebra, the overall concept is used in every GIS system that supports raster calculations. Early in its development, Dr. Tomlin made the decision to openly share all of the source code, documentation and algorithms with anyone that asked (pretty nice guy!). Consequently, the ideas and source code were incorporated into many commercial software packages. In the ESRI product suite, Map Algebra capabilities are provided through the SpatialAnalyst extension.

Illustration of a Neighborhood Maximum operation applied to produce a new data set.

If you would like to learn more about Map Algebra, the original book is Geographic Information Systems and Cartographic Modeling by C. Dana Tomlin. He is also the co-director of a research lab called the Cartographic Modeling Lab. And if you want to use Map Algebra and cartographic modeling in your organization, give us a call.

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Placing History: Released by ESRI Press

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 1, February 2008

"It's an exciting time for historians, and this book is an expression of that innovation."

Our work on the PhillyHistory project and development of the Sajara® product has given us a chance to meet and work with many people working in the field of ‘historical GIS’. In 2005, we participated in the GeoHistory Symposium developed by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL). We have also been working on a project at the University of Pennsylvania called ‘Mapping the DuBois Philadelphia Negro’ for which we are developing a web-based mapping application to support this research project led by Dr. Amy Hillier, Professor of City and Regional Planning at U-Penn. We’ll write about that in a future Azavea Journal, but the big news this month is that Dr. Hillier’s new book, Placing History has just been released by ESRI Press.

The full title - Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship – is a mouthful, but describes the contents well. Co-edited by Amy Hillier and historical geographer, Anne Kelly Knowles, the book is a series of case studies and essays on the key issues faced when using GIS tools to visualize historical information. With more powerful and easy-to-use software tools, geography is being applied to historical research in new unprecedented ways. Old maps are being mashed up against new maps, historical records are being geocoded to discover new patterns, and quantities of documents are being scanned and georeferenced. It’s an exciting time for historians, and this books is an expression of that innovation. An added bonus is a supplemental CD with software, data, powerpoints, videos, and notes for educators.

This book has been a lot of work for the editors and authors, but we’re just super-proud to see our friend Amy getting published. And if you’d like to hear her and co-editor Anne Kelly Knowles talk about the new book, check out the podcast.

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‘Googling’ Sajara: How Sajara Uses Google Earth and Google Maps … O’Reilly Radar calls it “fantastic”

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 6, December 2007

"... you can now fly through a 3D version of downtown Philadelphia, clicking on historic photos and displaying them in Google Earth."

The image above shows the results for geocoded historic photos from PhillyHistory.org found in Center City. The results are displayed in Google Earth.

Since their introduction in 2005, Google Maps and Google Earth have transformed the geospatial software world. Google Maps introduced a game-like, ‘slippy’ map interface that was simple and intuitive. Subsequent releases have added traffic, terrain, street-level photography, and a mapping toolkit that enable you to add maps to your web site. The Javascript-based Google Maps API lent itself to being combined with other web API’s and resulted in thousands of ‘mashups’ that displayed data on a Google Maps base map.

Google Earth, a technology Google acquired when it purchased Keyhole Corporation, is a software application that you download and install on your computer. It provides satellite and aerial imagery in a 3D environment. More important for folks like us, it supports KML (Keyhole Markup Language). KML enables us to add new data and display it in Google Earth.

We thought these Google tools were pretty neat, and we are always looking for ways to add cool new features to our projects and solutions. So in August, we added an RSS publication feature to our Sajara product, which runs the PhillyHistory web site. What’s RSS? It’s another web standard that is typically used by newspapers and blogs to provide syndication of articles. That sounds like publishing, so you might ask why we put RSS in a GIS product. Well, we had requests from PhillyHistory visitors to be able to save their searches and also be able to monitor when new photos were added to their area of the city. We thought that if every search could be turned into an RSS feed, then people would be able to use the RSS readers that are built into the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers to monitor when the photos in their area of interest are changing. But we then went one step further and added the latitude and longitude coordinates of each photo with a GeoRSS tag. GeoRSS is simple but powerful. And it’s supported by Google Maps, so you can now take a PhillyHistory search and paste it into a Google Maps search box and see the historic photos in Google Maps.

In October, we added Google Earth support to Sajara as well. Assets stored in a Sajara database can now be displayed in Google Earth three different ways. First, every photo with a location now has a button that says ‘Show in Google Earth’. Second, the first 100 records of any search can be shown as a group. Finally, we just added a feature whereby an entire collection can be displayed in Google Earth. For the PhillyHistory project, with more than 48,000 photos — and counting — it’s a pretty dense set of imagery, but you can now fly through a 3D version of downtown Philadelphia, clicking on historic photos and displaying them in Google Earth.

Peter Brantley in his recent “Mapping Philly” article in O’Reilly Radar, calls this latest feature “fantastic” … well, we couldn’t agree more. What a stunning cyber trip in history indeed!

Have you got ideas about how we can integrate our work with other internet sites? Let us know and we’ll see what we can do!

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What the Heck is…an SBIR?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 6, December 2007

"Through SBIR-funded research, Azavea is able to develop new technologies that we hope will both provide social value and grow into new products that create jobs and solve complex problems. "

Azavea was awarded a research grant by the National Science Foundation in December, 2006. This was our third such award in two years, and we are pretty proud. Usually, private companies are not allowed to be recipients of government grants, which are primarily awarded to universities, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. But these grants are different. They are part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The SBIR program was started in the 1982 by the National Science Foundation and now includes a dozen federal agencies.

SBIR grants and contracts are awarded based on a competition with each federal agency having its own variations on the rules, but with a largely similar format. The process is separated into two phases. In Phase I, companies submit innovative ideas for products and services that match a set of priorities issued by each agency. The agencies evaluate the ideas and award grants to the ones that appear both feasible and contribute to the objectives of each awarding agency. If the company wins a Phase I award – the process is extremely competitive with only 1 in 10 applications being successful – they have six months to prove the feasibility of the idea. If the idea is proven feasible, then they are allowed to submit a Phase II proposal.

Phase II awards are for larger amounts of money and are two-year grants, during which the company must develop a commercial product or service and bring it to market. Usually, the SBIR awards are not sufficient to complete the effort and require additional investment from the firm before they can be delivered to the marketplace. However, while limited in size, SBIR grants serve as a sort of venture capital effort that can fund high priority but risky projects that might not otherwise receive funding from the private market.

So why does Azavea go after these SBIR grants? We fund much of our R&D efforts internally, but sometimes we are presented with a complex technical hurdle that we are not sure how to solve. Or we have an idea for a product, but no client yet, and need a way to jump-start the development. Our DecisionTree geographic prioritization software, for example, was partially funded by a SBIR research contract from the Department of Agriculture. Under the grant, we tested the feasibility of developing a faster raster calculation engine. Through SBIR-funded research, Azavea is able to develop new technologies that we hope will both provide social value and grow into new products that create jobs and solve complex problems.

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What the Heck Is a Toolbox?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 5, October 2007

We all know what a ‘toolbox’ is in the physical world, but what do we mean by a toolbox in a GIS context? Toolboxes are a way to wrap up a series of GIS processes into a small software program. The ESRI ArcGIS platform includes several toolboxes with the desktop ArcView, ArcEditor and ArcInfo licensees. These toolboxes include things like ‘Data Management’, ‘Conversion Tools’ and ‘Analysis Tools’. Additional toolboxes are provided with extensions such as Spatial Analyst.

But toolboxes are not limited to functionality delivered by ESRI. Any GIS software process can be automated and turned into a toolbox for use in your organization. Toolboxes can be created from GIS models, python scripts or custom ArcObjects programs.

At Azavea, we are using the toolbox technology to automate the integration of the legislative districts that drive our Cicero web service. Our DecisionTree product also includes a custom toolbox that helps to create the raster GRID files that can be used as inputs in the online application. But the most exciting development with toolboxes arrived last year with the release of ArcGIS Server.

ArcGIS Server is much more than the successor to the internet map server technology in ArcIMS. While it is able to perform tasks such as map generation and geocoding, the full range of capabilities in the ArcObjects framework can be accessed. In addition, many types of toolboxes and models can be ‘published’ as web pages that enable users of an ArcGIS Server application to run those tools without the desktop application. This is an incredibly powerful capability. It means that not only can you build models and toolboxes to automate your desktop processes, but you can now enable visitors to your website to perform many of the same tasks. So, for example, let’s say that you work at a land trust. You might have built a conservation prioritization model to enable people inside your organization to quickly assess properties based on a series of input data sets. ArcGIS Server now makes it possible to make that model available to the town planning boards, citizen groups and other stakeholders in your region.

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What the Heck is…a GIS Model?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 4, August 2007

"When I founded Azavea seven years ago, one of my dreams was to make the process of building and executing GIS models easier."
Robert Cheetham

We usually think of a ‘model’ as a way of representing the world. But the term model can be a bit confusing in the GIS world. There are data models – a way of representing the world in a database. We have many ways of representing the world in a GIS database – points, lines, polygons, images, surfaces and 3D volumes are the most common but there are many variations on these basic building blocks. In recent years standard data models have been developed to encompass common concerns in particular domains. ESRI and other organizations have published data models for transportation, land records, hydrology, telecom, water/wastewater, to name just a few. Contemporary software is usually structured in terms of objects. Object models help us to represent the world in a software program.

A third type of model represents our world in terms of processes. In this sense, a GIS model is a sequence of processes that generate a measurement, create a map, transform existing data sets into new ones or run repeatedly to create a simulation. The objectives of a process model can vary broadly. Very commonly, a model is simply a way to automate a sequence of actions that we would otherwise have to perform manually. In other cases, the model may be generating a measurement or other output for a particular set of inputs.

Azavea has worked on a few projects that were composed almost entirely of this type of model. The Natural Lands Trust developed the SmartConservation model, a methodology for scoring any location in SE Pennsylvania by calculating more than 40 different conservation and landscape ecology metrics. These scores were combined into a single SmartConservation score for a property that indicated its conservation value. Azavea wrote software using ArcIMS and ArcObjects to automatically calculate these metrics with only a web browser.

These types of models have existed on paper for as long as people have been using GIS software, but it become much easier to chain together a series of operations with the advent of flowchart-style tools now present in several GIS software packages. In the ArcGIS environment, models are created by either writing a script or using ModelBuilder. ModelBuilder is a visual programming language that enables an ArcGIS user to drag data sets and GIS processes onto a drawing surface where they can be connected together and turned into sequences of operations. The models (which are also known as ‘tools’) can be strung together into larger models, can be shared amongst users with common data sets and can even be published on the web using ArcGIS Server.

When I founded Azavea seven years ago, one of my dreams was to make the process of building and executing GIS models easier. Are there processes you would like to automate or geographic models you would like to build? Give us a call.

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What the Heck is a Web Service?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 3, May 2007

In addition to development of custom GIS web applications, Azavea has been developing web services for the past few years. What exactly are web services? They are a standards-based way to provide software building blocks over a network. They are not complete web applications on their own. Rather, they are small pieces of capability that can be combined to build new applications. A web service is also sometimes called a Web API (Application Programming Interface).

One web service that Azavea developed and hosts is Cicero. Cicero is a legislative district locator, elected official database, and legislative mapping service that provides data on local, state, and national legislatures. It is being used to support political advocacy campaigns and data integration.

ESRI also offers a suite of web services known as ArcWeb Services that provides geocoding, spatial query, and map generation capabilities that can be integrated into any application with access to the web. Several of Azavea’s web applications use ArcWeb Services, including Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children’s (DVAEYC) CONNECT Services. This application uses ArcWeb for routing and geocoding. The key advantage is that the service provider (ESRI) takes responsibility for providing up-to-date street data, and we can focus on how we want the application to use the data instead of managing it ourselves.

Web services can also be chained together so that one building block is used by another to provide a new capability. For example, in Cicero, we use ArcWeb Services for locating addresses, but then we use the Cicero data for looking up the legislative districts, creating maps or finding data about legislators for the location. When web services are linked together like this into a more complex system, it is sometimes known as a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Web services are a fundamental part of the Web 2.0 revolution that focuses on making data open and easily sharable. There are several web sites that facilitate working with web services. Programmable Web is sort of like a phone book for public web API’s. OpenKapow enables users to develop their own web services that consist of sequences of actions one would take on a web site to view data or perform an activity. And Yahoo! Pipes enables users to combine sequences of RSS feeds into customized data streams.

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How Does Azavea Use Open Source Software?

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 1, January 2007

"Open source software is typically created as a collaborative effort in which programmers improve upon the code and share the changes within the community."

Open source software are programs in which the source code is available to the general public for use and modification free of charge – it’s open. Open source software are typically created as a collaborative effort in which programmers improve upon the code and share the changes within the community. This is a little different from ‘freeware’ or ‘shareware’ because the availability of the original source code enables users to make their own modifications in order to adapt it to their needs. So, you might ask, how do people make money at this? Well, they don’t – at least not in the traditional sense of selling a software license for a fee. Many open source projects are volunteer projects in which one or more interested programers have a problem they want to solve, so they create a new tool and then make it available to the public. Larger projects involve teams of collaborators from all over the world. The more sophisticated projects, like Linux or the Apache web server, frequently enable scores of individuals and companies to have profitable businesses by providing support, modifications and other services for the otherwise free software.

Azavea uses open source software in a number of ways. We use programmer tools such as NUnit for writing unit tests, Subversion source control, NDoc for creating software documentation, Notepad++ for text editing, the Apache web server, the DotNetNuke content management system, WinMerge text comparison software and the Firefox browser. Furthermore, we use some open source GIS software such as MapServer and PostGIS. But we are an ESRI Business Partner, so is there not a contradiction in our use of open source GIS software? We don’t think so. Most of our clients ask for ESRI GIS software. ESRI’s software is by far the most capable, integrated and full-featured product line available on the market with offerings from cell phones to enterprise servers. But we also think that open source projects like MapServer and PostGIS are an important part of the software ecosystem, providing alternatives to commercial software that fit well in some scenarios.

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Esphero Global Geocoder

By Robert Cheetham Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 1, January 2007

We hear every day that we live in an increasingly global world. But, GoogleEarth notwithstanding, there is a dearth of digital data for much of the planet. Last year, one of our clients asked us to do some research on the availability of address geocoding services with a global reach. ‘Geocoding’ is the process of assigning geographic coordinates based on an address, place name or other location identifier. We did our best, but came up empty-handed. There were a few such services but they were either relatively costly or were limited to geocoding based on place names only. While we realized that we wouldn’t find high quality street and address data in every country, we were surprised not to find a service that would perform international geocoding by address. Or better yet, we thought there should be a way to access multiple geocoding services for each country starting with the highest precision and then making our way down a list of alternative data sources until we found the location.

Enter Esphero Global Geocoder, stage left. Esphero is a global address geo-coding service that can return latitude and longitude for locations around the world. We looked at several geocoding offerings including Microsoft MapPoint.Net Web Service and Google, but the broadest set of Web Services available at a modest price was ESRI’s ArcWeb Services. This included street level geocoding for the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, Australia and a growing list of other countries plus place name (gazetteer service) and postal code identification for most other parts of the world. Esphero is currently being offered on a service bureau basis whereby organizations can send us a database of addresses (including international data) and we send back the same records with latitude and longitude coordinates attached. But we are working on some improvements including a Web Service offering that can be embedded in your own web site or software application.

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Avatars by Sterling Adventures

Articles by
Robert Cheetham

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OpenDataPhilly.org to Launch on April 25

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What the Heck is… GPU?

Avencia Has A New Name: Meet….Azavea

Conference Report: 10th Crime Mapping Research Conference (CMRC)

ESRI Business Partner Conference and Developer Summit Review

What the Heck is … OpenStreetMap?

What the Heck is … ArcGIS Server?

‘Locating Memory’ by Wil Lindsay: An Art Exhibit that’s Worth Being Put on the Map

What is PhillyStat?

ESRI President’s Award 2008 Awarded to City of Philadelphia’s MOIS GIS Applications

DecisionTree Used by the City of Asheville to Enhance Its Economic Development Efforts

What the Heck Is … PostGIS?

What the Heck is…OpenLayers?

Tracking the Fraud-ulators with GIS

What the Heck is…Map Algebra?

Placing History: Released by ESRI Press

‘Googling’ Sajara: How Sajara Uses Google Earth and Google Maps … O’Reilly Radar calls it “fantastic”

What the Heck is…an SBIR?

What the Heck Is a Toolbox?

What the Heck is…a GIS Model?

What the Heck is a Web Service?

How Does Azavea Use Open Source Software?

Esphero Global Geocoder

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Articles by Robert Cheetham

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Robert Cheetham