Articles by
Tamara Manik-Perlman

Indicators On-The-Go: MetroPulse Provides Urban Data About Communities Around Chicago Via the iPhone

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Mobile software that runs on smart phones and tablets is increasingly important, and here at Azavea we’ve been hard at work on a range of apps. We recently set our sights beyond Philadelphia to the great city of Chicago, and had the pleasure of collaborating with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) on a native iOS application.  We’re happy to announce that the MetroPulse app is available now in the Apple App Store and complements the website of the same name by enabling users to search over 200 indicators for the seven-county region and generate reports while on the move.

The MetroPulse site and app are an initiative of the Regional Indicators Project, created in partnership by CMAP and The Chicago Community Trust. Like many urban areas (including Azavea’s hometown of Philadelphia), Chicago is changing rapidly, and the goal of the MetroPulse app is to facilitate informed and effective decision-making by providing citizens and other stakeholders with ready access to current data about issues that shape the livability of communities.

People can take advantage of their device’s location services to retrieve a selection of indicators—Arts and Culture, Demographics, Economy, Environment, Property, Safety—for their current location, or can select a location from a list.  Alternately, they can compare values for a single indicator across multiple locations—counties, municipalities or Chicago Community Areas— and view the results in a table or graph.

As an app developed natively for iOS in Objective-C, MetroPulse represents one key aspect of Azavea’s mobile development work.  We recently released the PhillyHistory Augmented Reality (AR) application for both iOS and Android by employing wrappers around the Layar framework, and other teams and individuals have been experimenting with PhoneGap and HTML5-based apps.  There are many ways to do mobile application development, and Azavea is committed to exploring all of the options and employing the solution that is most appropriate for a given project.

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Seminar Announcement: An Introduction to Mapping for Nonprofits

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Azavea’s Spatial Analysis and Cartography team has worked with nonprofits across many domains to help them use mapping to answer a variety of research questions.

In health and human services, the Utility Emergency Services Fund (UESF) approached us to help them demonstrate to each member of City Council the magnitude of the organization’s work assisting low-income families in their district.  We also worked with the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children (DVAEYC) to develop maps visualizing the availability of quality childcare relative to need.

To support the economic development efforts of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Azavea conducted an impact assessment using spatial statistical techniques like Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) to explore the relationship between property values and cleaning and greening efforts on vacant lots.

Arts organizations have also found value in our spatial analysis services to help them communicate more effectively with their supporters.  The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s advocacy efforts rely on our Cicero legislative information service, while The Wilma Theater turned to us when they wanted to analyze their patron data to identify promising markets they may have been missing.

At the national scale, we worked with the political transparency organization MAPLight.org to automate the generation of more than 400 maps to visualize the extent contributions to members of the U.S. Congress had originated outside of each legislator’s home district.

While these organizations have recognized the ability of maps to help them achieve their institutional goals, there are many more nonprofit organizations that possess a wealth of spatial data without even realizing it.  Azavea has partnered with NPower Pennsylania to offer a half-day workshop that will get you started thinking spatially and will illustrate how maps can be powerful tools for planning programs, demonstrating outcomes, and communicating strategically.

Covered topics include:

  • Best practices for collecting, managing and sharing geodata
  • An introduction to geocoding
  • An overview of key map types
  • Pointers to free and low-cost resources to get you started with mapping and GIS

This is more a conceptual than a technical workshop so no experience with mapping is necessary, but the content will best suited to people familiar with their organization’s data.

“Putting Maps to Work: Using your data for planning, reporting and advocacy” will take place on March 14th and March 17th from 9am to 1pm at NPower PA’s Center City location and will cost is $20 (includes a boxed lunch).  WARNING: Both dates are now sold out.  Interested in another mapping for nonprofits seminar? Let us know!

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Where Should We Go? CommonSpace Helps Philadelphians Answer the Perennial Question

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A preview version of CommonSpace (http://commonspace.us/) made its Philadelphia-exclusive debut on August 13th, just in time for users to plan their attendance at this year’s Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe. The tool is a collaborative destination discovery and sustainable transit planning web application and is the product of a yearlong collaboration between Azavea and the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, NPower Pennsylvania and the William Penn Foundation.

CommonSpace was an enriching project for Azavea because it enabled us to expand our work in social and technical areas core to the company’s mission. The application’s interactive, real-time transitshed visualization extends the concept underlying theWalkshed project.  It also encourages community-building and sustainability by making it easier for users to have fun while making environmentally and socially responsible transportation choices.  Technically, the challenge of developing a scalable web site that can support complex geoprocessing for large numbers of visitors was also an opportunity to push the limits of our distributed computing technology.

CommonSpace enables users to search for Live Arts Festival and Philly Fringe events and other social activities within an area accessible to everyone in a group of friends

So just what does CommonSpace do? Borrowing from the urban planning concept of a “walkshed”– the area that is accessible to pedestrians within a given time period – the web site enables users to calculate their personal “transportation-shed” or “transitshed” to find activities and events within that area.  A user begins by entering a location, whether they want to walk, bike or take public transit, and the length of time they are willing to travel; the application generates an interactive map of the areas that are reachable given these criteria. If the user adds transitsheds for their companions, the application will identify the areas convenient to all of them: their common space.

A user can then search within this space for activities and locations — dining, shows, cultural events, shopping, and more — and add interesting destinations to a plan that can be shared with friends or be used to generate directions.  Integrating this destination data from feed partners afforded Azavea the opportunity to work with leading regional organizations including the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC) and the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance (GPCA). By unifying information from blogs, databases, and public listings, CommonSpace demonstrates how geospatial technologies can filter the simultaneously overwhelming and fragmented resources available on the Internet to make them accessible and meaningful.

The platform is built on a combination of OpenStreetMap data and transit data from SEPTA (the Philadelphia regional transit agency), which was recently released in the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) format.  To calculate the transitsheds, the system uses the open source GraphServer framework. Once a user selects a starting location and mode of transit, tens of thousands of possible routes are mapped behind the scenes. The result is rendered on a map, and users can move a slider to increase or decrease the time they are willing to travel and see their transitshed grow or shrink accordingly.

DecisionTree logoWithout optimization, the complex geoprocessing required for each user would take too long and require too many computer server resources to integrate into a high traffic website.  As part of our optimization process, we used an experimental, next-generation version of our DecisionTree technology, code-named Trellis, for distributing the geographic data processing across many servers.  Developed using Scala, an emerging programming language with powerful constructs for parallel processing, this new technology enables CommonSpace to remain performant even with many simultaneous users.

CommonSpace will be available during a preview period lasting through October 15th. Where the application goes next will depend on feedback from users like you! Visit CommonSpace.us to try it out and tell us what features you like or don’t like, how you see yourself using it, and what you’d like added in the future.

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Behind the Scenes at Azavea: Our Latest Eats – A Culinary Escapade, Courtesy of CommonSpace

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In our last newsletter we introduced you to the volunteer gigs Azavea employees are currently involved in.  This month, we have food on the brain.  As we trek through Philadelphia we’ve been stumbling on some great restaurants (from street vendors to “three-bell” establishments and everything in between).  We have just released CommonSpace,  a tool to help you discover great places to nosh and find entertainment, whatever part of Philadelphia you may find yourself in.  In fact, CommonSpace has been helping us navigate our evening outings to our favorite Live Arts Festival performances. Take the following scenario:*

1. Software developer Matthew McFarland is a theater lover and is looking to catch a show that he can get to within 20 minutes when he leaves Azavea at 6pm. Searching the Live Arts feed for theater events shows him that Cankerblossom fits the bill, so he adds it to his plan.

2. Project Manager Chip Hitchens, on the other hand, is more an interpretive dance kind of guy. He’ll be traveling on foot from a meeting with the MPIP folks at Temple University and is more than happy to walk 30 minutes in the pursuit of great performance art. His Live Arts search for dance turns up Fresh Juice, which is right up his alley.

3. Matthew and Chip are interested in getting together for a bite to eat to compare notes on the works that they have just experienced. They’d like to find a place that they can each get to within 15 minutes, Chip on foot and Matthew by public transit. To do this, they convert their destinations to starting points with the handy “Search Nearby” button.

4. Once the application has identified their common space, the guys search the Yelp feed for promising dining opportunities. There’s an awful lot of pizza available in the area, but only one truly mouthwatering Italian option. To play around with the plan and see which eatery Matthew and Chip settled on, visit http://commonspace.us/?permalink=hmSqeTzDHC894py1NdPo

* This is a work of fiction.  Any resemblance to Chip’s actual interpretive dance technique is purely speculative.

Matthew and Chip are not the only foodophiles at Azavea. We’ve polled everyone in the office about their latest Philly food experiences. Check it out!

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Philly’s Election Results Searchable and Mappable through Kaleidocade: Over 4 Million Records

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"...KIF would make it simple for elections commissions to share data with the public [and] ... could accommodate data for any locality, from any time period."

Over the past few years, Azavea has been involved with numerous elections-related projects, ranging from election-day incident reporting to consulting for candidates at every level of government. During the course of this work, we’ve occasionally needed to incorporate voter registration information or historical election results into our analysis. The public records request process can be arduous and cumbersome. And, all too often, even when a request is granted, we’ve found ourselves photocopying primary source records or holding a 100-page printout of the information we were seeking. Needless to say, we’ve been surprised that information so vital to the functioning of our democracy is rarely provided in a form that is easy for average citizens to access.

Map of the percent of the vote won by Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential general election, by precinct

Recently, as we began to develop a sample application to demonstrate the ways the Kaleidocade Indicators Framework (KIF) can be used to visualize and interpret local datasets, we realized that we had the opportunity to illustrate how historical elections data can be made available to the public in a user-friendly web interface. To this end, we assembled the results of elections held in Philadelphia for all state and national offices from 1992 to 2008, along with the results of the 2007 elections for city offices — all told, more than 4 million records.

We’re excited to announce that the election results that we acquired are now available in the online KIF Local Sample at both the precinct and the ward levels. Users can generate a simple report based on an address or can assemble a fine-tuned collection of indicators by selecting particular candidates and geographies. Once an indicator collection is complete, KIF provides many options for interpreting the data. Visualizing election results on a map allows users to detect spatial patterns in candidate performance. Users can customize the data display by changing the class break schemes or color ramps, and by overlaying selected features and boundaries. The data can also be examined in a table (including trendlines of candidate performance over time), viewed as statistical summaries like distribution histograms, or compared through ranked lists of results.

Increasingly, from the federal to the local level, transparency and open government are becoming mandates. Our local sample serves as a prime example of how KIF would make it simple for elections commissions to share data with the public. Offering historical election data through a web application also has the advantage of making public records requests a self-serve process that can reduce the burden on elections commissions’ personnel. And while historical data is important, a tool like KIF can also be adapted to near real-time election results reporting. Rather than releasing text summaries of election results after the fact, city elections officials could enter precinct results into KIF as they are reported, making the web interface a valuable breaking-news and public information tool.

In the meantime, the KIF team plans to continue adding Philadelphia election results to the local sample, including the Philadelphia mayoral and city council races from 2003 and 2005. Check out this powerful local resource and spread the word! If you’re interested in politics and open government, you might also want to take a look at Cicero Live (described below) and the Elections and Advocacy sample application of DecisionTree, Azavea’s web-based geographic decision-making tools, with which you can simulate a canvassing or GOTV campaign.

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