Vol. 2 Issue 5, October 2007

Vol. 2 Issue 5
October 2007

Writing an introduction for the Azavea Journal is kind of like driving a monster truck in the demolition derby down at the Savannah civic center. It takes brains, brawn, and nerves of steel. But when the deed is done, and bits of mangled steel are all strewn around us, we know we'll get everyone's attention! Are we getting carried away? Yes, maybe ... but who wouldn't want to know about the enormous amount of data we have added to Cicero (our elected official lookup), the release of PhillyHistory Mobile, the use and significance of GIS in trauma center siting, and the 3 new colleagues we are welcoming to our team? Welcome to another edition of the Azavea Journal!

Cicero: Tons of New Data Available

By Abby Fretz Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 5, October 2007

"Information is the currency of democracy." - Thomas Jefferson

“Information is the currency of democracy. –Thomas Jefferson

Our democratic institutions rely on citizens, businesses, and other organizations that are willing to communicate needs and opinions to their elected officials. But do you know who all of your legislators are or how to reach them? I don’t either. Cicero is designed to help. It is a Web API (application programming interface) that enables you to add legislator lookup capabilities to any web site or software application. It is a cost-effective and precise way to deliver this information, including maps showing the district boundaries. In a nutshell, it is a web-based, easily integratable elected official lookup for local, state, and national information. It simply matches addresses with the elected officials who represent these addresses.

We built Cicero in early 2006 to support local arts advocacy in Pennsylvania. By fall of that year, we offered a national service covering 40 cities. We are thrilled to announce the recent release of several new, comprehensive sets of data: In addition to city council districts for more than 60 cities we now offer district lookup and legislator contact data (district number, address(es), phone number(s), email, party, etc.) for all U.S. state and federal legislative districts. We continue to update Cicero as elections take place, legislators are replaced and regions go through the process of redistricting. You can try Cicero here.

We created Cicero with the intention of giving advocacy groups, non-profits, foundations and politically active individuals access to accurate local, state, and national elected official contact information, quickly and all in one central location vs. through multiple online resources. Organizations can subscribe to a web-service API that seamlessly interfaces with their constituents’ databases for them to provide their own stakeholders with a customizable array of contact information for key political decision-makers across the United States. This information is used to empower citizens to engage with their elected officials and thereby influence the outcome of decisions. Cicero can provide you with the local legislator data that you need to affect policy. And it now has state, national, and school districts information on top of that!

Visit the Cicero website for more information, as well as updated lists of available data.

U.S. school district lookup as well as Canada and Australia legislative districts, coming soon!

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PhillyHistory Mobile Version Released: Carry Philly in Your Pocket and Become a History Sleuth!

By Rachel Cheetham-Richard Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 5, October 2007

"... it can be adapted to virtually any historic, cultural or commercial asset."

We have just launched the mobile version of PhillyHistory. It is now accessible from most cell phones, handheld computers and other mobile devices enabling anyone to search the more than 45,000 historic photos currently on the PhillyHistory site at anytime and from anywhere.

PhillyHistory Mobile can serve pedestrians and visitors curious to see what their surroundings used to look like; organizers of historic tours; and teachers who are interested in making their history curricula more interactive. It has a simple search screen in which you can enter an address or intersection of nearby historic or cultural sites. The resulting display returns a map of the area showing coordinates for various historic and cultural assets in close proximity, accompanied by photos of those assets.

This innovative mobile website leverages Sajara, our web-based digital asset management software. It was built on ESRI’s ArcGIS server technology and ASP.NET 2.0 Mobile Controls. The greatest advantage of Sajara is that it can be adapted to virtually any historic, cultural or commercial asset. It can be applied to cultural resources of any kind (murals, architectural assets, and paintings), tours, real estate, the restaurant industry, and environmental information.

The mobile website has been tested for browsers on various devices using device emulators including the Pocket PC, Openwave, Sony Ericsson and many more. It’s designed to work on phones with Internet browsers that support wml, html or xhtml.

PhillyHistory Mobile is an extension of PhillyHistory.org, developed by Azavea in 2004 to help the City Archives preserve its deteriorating and aging photographic memories, PhillyHistory.org attracts thousands of unique visitors each month. Its e-commerce module supports funding of the project and creates revenue through the sale of prints and digital photos. New images from the City Archives’ estimated two million photos are uploaded and viewable from both PhillyHistory media at a rate of two thousand per month. And now you can take a mobile tour of Philadelphia’s past from a handheld computer or other mobile device, visit mobile.phillyhistory.org and enjoy your ride on what Philadelphia Magazine has called “your own flux-capacitor-fueled DeLorean”!

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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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GIS and Trauma Center Siting

By Megan Heckert Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 5, October 2007

"The difference between life and death for severely injured people depends upon the amount of time it takes to get them to a trauma center hospital."

The difference between life and death for severely injured people depends upon the amount of time it takes to get them to a trauma center hospital. The siting of trauma center hospitals, however, is more complex than just maps of land area coverage showing ringed bands around each hospital. Surrounding helicopter and ambulance locations and speeds, the number and location of trauma centers in a region, and the spatial relationships between these facilities also need to be considered. To be viable, the hospital must serve a large enough population of severely injured people to maintain the skills of its healthcare providers and offer high quality care.

A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University set out to develop a mathematical model to assist with trauma center siting while taking these important considerations into account, and to make that model accessible through the Internet. They have developed the Trauma Resource Allocation Model for Ambulances and Hospitals (TRAMAH), a mathematical optimization model that uses population and access to existing trauma centers based on geographic relationships to ambulances and helicopters to simulate the effects of newly sited trauma centers.

Azavea partnered with the researchers and the Cartographic Modeling Lab to develop an interactive website enabling visitors to specify timeframe (access within 45 or 60 minutes) and transportation mode (ambulance, helicopter, or both), and identify the locations of current hospitals and trauma centers and their accessibility. The application provides a map and coverage information based on percentages of population and land covered by the existing system.

This website, which leverages ESRI’s ArcIMS and ArcSDE technologies, is now accessible to the public at http://tramah.cml.upenn.edu.

Many other factors may need to be taken into consideration in siting trauma centers, and the TRAMAH system will be best used alongside, rather than instead of, the specialized knowledge of trauma systems planners. It does, however, demonstrate the very real value that GIS can add when dealing with limited resources that must be allocated over extensive geographic areas.

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Fresh Faces at Azavea

By Abby Fretz Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 5, October 2007

A U.S. Air Force veteran ... a conservative who is also a liberal, a backpacker and coffee afficionado ... and an urban sleuth. That's what we call an interesting mix of people!

Dana Bauer, Carissa Britain, and Aaron Ogle

Azavea welcomes several new additions to our team. We continue to experience unprecedented growth and, in recent months, have opened several positions and met with many exciting candidates. In September we welcomed three new staff members (and we look forward to welcoming some more colleagues in the next newsletter).

Carissa Brittain joins Azavea as a software developer on our Sajara team. Carissa has over 9 years experience in software design, development and maintenance. Most recently she was employed by the United States Air Force with the 2nd Weather Group, HQ Air Force Weather Agency, where she supervised a weather report customization/GIS team and developed GIS applications. Carissa enjoys computer and tabletop games, great restaurants, hiking and backpacking, and is an avid reader. She has recently moved to Philadelphia from Omaha, Nebraska with her husband, Delany, and Great Dane, Bella.

Aaron Ogle joins Azavea as a software developer with over five years of industry experience and will be working with our Land Records team. He most recently comes from Seattle, WA and the Varolii Corporation where he was responsible for developing client-specific communications software and integrating it with corporate enterprise systems. Azavea was able to lure him away from the Great Northwest with the opportunity to join his passion for urban sustainability with his skills as a software developer (and to allow his baby boy to be closer to his grandparents). Besides being a tech geek, Aaron is a distance runner, a transit advocate, an amateur theologian, an environmentalist, a liberal, a conservative, a backpacker, a coffee aficionado, a writer, a reader, a husband, and a dad.

Dana Bauer joins us as an intern and will be spending most of her time working with the Cicero team. She is pursuing a master’s degree in geography and urban studies at Temple University, where her research interests are in the areas of GIS, spatial statistics, and the urban environment. Ask her about her thesis on Philadelphia green spaces; it’s almost all she thinks about these days. In her previous life, Dana worked as a science writer and PR flack at a major research university in central Pennsylvania (Go State!). Dana likes reading, running, hiking, politics, urban sleuthing, digital photography and her husband’s gourmet cooking. She truly believes that GIS can make the world a better place.

Welcome to all!

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A “SMART” Puzzle

By Chip Hitchens Published in

Vol. 2 Issue 5, October 2007

The SMART System of the US Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) makes a wide range of data available to anyone interested in and professionals involved in identifying, halting, or preventing juvenile delinquency.

Let’s say that you represent an organization in Pennsylvania that is working to curb juvenile crime, and you’re going to use the SMART System to apply for a grant relating poverty to crime. Register with the SMART system, then press the Mapping and Analysis button (no search text is required) and choose Pennsylvania > Counties. Then choose the ‘Economic’ indicators that will help you answer the following questions:

1. Using the map, what County in Southeastern Pennsylvania sticks out as having a disproportionately high percentage of children living in poverty?

2. What three counties have the highest percentage of families living in poverty (use most recent indicator data)?

3. Using the appropriate ‘Crime’ indicators, answer the following question: Name the three counties reporting the highest juvenile crime rate.

Be the first to send an email with all three correct answers to info@azavea.com and we will send you a $20 gift card to Barnes & Noble!

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