Vol. 2 Issue 1, January 2007

Vol. 2 Issue 1
January 2007

From new faces, to a new product and a new SBIR award, this edition of Azavea Journal contains a lot of new announcements. And while we are at it, all of us at Azavea wish you a really terrific Happy New Year!

What’s in a Widget?

By David Zwarg Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 1, January 2007

"Development of widgets as new faces for existing web services pushes geographic data to lightweight and easily distributable clients."

As a technology company, Azavea is competing in an ever-changing market. One way Azavea stays current with emerging technologies is by sanctioning research projects in variegated technologies, headed by full-time staff members. Research projects range from Open Source projects to pro bono GIS services for the community. One of these research projects involves the Yahoo! Widget Engine, which builds upon Azavea’s existing Web Services expertise.

Widgets are cross-platform applications that run inside of a runtime engine. These widgets, while compact, are built upon an internet-ready engine that provides connectivity to URL resources and Web Services with minimal programming.

In addition, widgets have strong support for innovative interface designs, challenging the “window” interface modality that is ubiquitous across all desktop applications.

Development of widgets as new faces for existing Web Services pushes geographic data to lightweight and easily distributable clients, in addition to providing Web Services for application level support. Azavea is continuously exploring ways to disseminate geographic knowledge; exploring and challenging the way existing knowledge is transacted enhances the company’s repertoire of geographic solutions.

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SBIR Grant Award Announcement: HunchLab – Leveraging Spatial Statistics to Validate Human Intuition

By Cecilia Buchanan and Dave Felcan Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 1, January 2007

As part of their daily activities, police officers often formulate hunches based on observations and other sources of information. Large amounts of crime data already exist in electronic form, so officers have been using information management systems and visualization tools to help sift through this data. Despite the availability of these tools, hunches remain difficult to confirm or deny.

We are pleased to announce that the National Science Foundation recently awarded Azavea a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to design and evaluate ‘HunchLab’, a prototype system that will enable police officers to develop and evaluate hunches.

‘HunchLab’ was inspired by the Crime Spike Detector that Azavea developed to help the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) identify when and where unusual increases in crime are occurring. The Crime Spike Detector, which has been in operation since June 2005, uses a spatial statistics algorithm developed in conjunction with Dr. Tony Smith (University of Pennsylvania) to compare current crime to historical crime across the city. Each night this ‘data mining’ service checks for spikes in different types of crime. Unusual increases result in an email being sent to the relevant district captain. The email details the severity of the spike and links to an online report with maps, charts and tables, enabling analysis of the result (learn more). Although ‘HunchLab’ will initially be developed to assist with crime detection, tools such as the Spike Detector and ‘HunchLab’ are applicable in any application where events display geographic changes in distribution, such as disease occurrence, consumer buying patterns and real estate sales.

‘HunchLab’ is supported by the Small Business Innovation Research program of the National Science Foundation, Directorate for Engineering, Division of Industrial Innovations and Partnerships, Award Number (IIP-0637589).

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Department of Records ParcelExplorer

By Michael McLarnon Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 1, January 2007

"ParcelExplorer enables public end-users to enter an address or registry map number and view property records...of the paper-based registry maps."

The Philadelphia ParcelExplorer application, as a project for the Department of Records, is one of Azavea’s latest web-based applications. Unique in the U.S. and already more than 100-subscribers strong, ParcelExplorer enables public end-users to enter an address or registry map number and view property records information including scanned version of the paper-based registry maps.

Additionally, users are able to measure parcels and lines; add annotation to the maps; display a printable copy; display condominium information; and display parcel history.

Registry maps, or land parcel record maps, have been kept in Philadelphia for a long time, but have only been recently digitized by the City’s Records Department. Digitizing the data means that they are much easier to organize and keep updated, but there was a desire to keep scans of the original maps, which were recorded on linen, so that they could be viewable along with the digitized data. The ParcelExplorer application solved this problem by enabling users to use scans of the originals as background to the digitized map (learn more).

There are several new features to be rolled out soon, most notably the addition of historic maps from the Philadelphia Free Library. These include the Hexamer-Locher Philadelphia maps made between 1858 and 1860, and land-use maps from 1942 and 1962. The historic map scans were made and contributed by the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Another recent improvement is the addition of links to historic photos at PhillyHistory.org. Now, when you look at a parcel or historic map, you can find historic photos nearby.

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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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Photo Contest

By Abby Fretz Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 1, January 2007

Over the past several months we’ve introduced you to PhillyHistory.org, an engaging website Azavea created for the City of Philadelphia Department of Records (DOR). The city archives house over 2 million photographs, dating back to the late nineteenth century. The DOR came to Azavea, seeking a way to digitize, organize and store this historic collection. PhillyHistory.org allows users to search for images by location, address, keyword, or date, and purchase these photographs.

As we continue to unearth the fascinating photos stored in the city archives we look for opportunities to share them with you. Explore the website and be the first to answer the questions below to win a $25 gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. Send your answers to info@azavea.com.

PhillyHistory Quiz
What famous opera house opened in 1870 in Philadelphia, became a burlesque theater in the 1940s and today attracts a much different music-loving crowd?

A. Do a Phillyhistory ‘keyword’ search under the theater’s modern name and look for a picture of the interior of the theater. What is the the word painted upside down on the ceiling?

B. What guest band played at that theatre on New Year’s Eve, 2006 (Azavea is proud to have added this band to our office music playlist)?

C. List the name of two of the acts (found on posters outside the theater) in the theater’s ‘seedier’ days.

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Meet Our Drexel Co-Op Interns

By Abby Fretz Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 1, January 2007

The world of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and GIS related software design has been growing at a rapid pace. Azavea has recognized the value of introducing talented student programmers to the world of GIS and geographic-based programming and have highly valued the innovative, fresh outlook our talented interns bring to the Azavea team.

Kate Ericson
Kate joins us as a fourth year Computer Science major from Drexel University. In her current and third internship, Kate was seeking to spend the large part of her day writing code for interesting projects. During her time at Azavea Kate has strengthened her logic skills and has added to her experience of working with databases. She enjoys working on software that incorporates spatial elements such as mapping as it has pushed her to think beyond a linear approach to programming. An avid student of Japanese culture, Kate takes Japanese language classes at Drexel and is a white belt Aikido student – a skill which she shared with the rest of the office during a recent lunch meeting.

Bernard Wolff
Bernard also joins us as a fourth year Computer Science major from Drexel. Like Kate, Bernard completed two internships prior to joining Azavea. Having gone through his first two internships with large, corporate companies he was looking for an experience with a small company where he would get to know the entire staff. In Azavea, he also saw the opportunity to learn new programs and skills he had not previously encountered. Here, he has been able to write a global geocoding application of considerable size and depth. Additionally, Bernard has built the new Azavea family web sites (making their debut in the new year!) using the content management software, DotNetNuke. Bernard enjoys hiking, camping and soaking up the great outdoors.

‘Tune in’ in March for an introduction to our two History graduate students from Temple and their work in the Philadelphia City Archives for PhillyHistory.org.

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