Vol. 3 Issue 2, April 2008

Vol. 3 Issue 2
April 2008

It's springtime, and we all know what that means, right? Don't you remember what Friend Owl told Bambi? "Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the springtime ... You're walking along, minding your own business ... when all of a sudden you run smack into a pretty face ... you begin to get weak in the knees." Well, this month, we have a lineup for you that will make you weak in the knees! PhillyHistory and Sajara just got an extreme makeover, HunchLab just batted her eyelashes into an award, we also hired two new staff members, and we've been experimenting with some great applications using ESRI's software along a variety of open source technologies. So, don't look now because you're about to be twitterpated. Welcome to another edition of the Azavea Journal!

Photo: Butter and Egg Stall 2nd St & Bainbridge St, 1935 Courtesy of PhillyHistory.org

Sajara Now Supports Maps and Its Mapping Interface Has Gone Through An Extreme Makeover

By Carissa Brittain and Rachel Cheetham-Richard Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 2, April 2008

"Our first goal for the re-design of the PhillyHistory.org search page was to bring [location-based searches] into focus by giving [them] the place of honor at the top of the search options."

One of the difficulties a software developer faces in designing a complex web page is the user interface. Striking a balance between advanced functionality and ease-of-use is a challenge for even the most seasoned designer. Understanding how a user will approach and utilize the page will often determine where certain page elements are located and how they appear; and watching real users use the page is a rare treat. We recently had an opportunity to observe new users work with the PhillyHistory.org search page and made an important discovery. Our most powerful search options – location and address-based searches — were often not being used effectively! Sajara is designed so that the address search option can match street addresses or intersections to map coordinates, automatically move the map to that location, and return assets in the area; all with one click. Our first goal for the re-design of the PhillyHistory.org’s search page was to bring this powerful tool into focus by giving it the place of honor at the top of the search options.

Beyond the fairly simple task of re-ordering search options, we are also excited to launch a new function in Sajara that enables the upload, management, and search of a whole new class of documents: maps. In the new version of Sajara, searching for maps is as simple as searching for photographs and other documents. Simply use the search options or the map to limit your search to a place, subject or time, and use the new tabs to view either photographs or maps. While PhillyHistory.org currently holds 5,000 maps, our archivists will be adding more each week along with new photographs to enrich PhillyHistory.org’s view into the city’s past.

Most importantly, in order to enhance users’ experience on the site, especially with the map search functions, we decided to entirely re-design the search page using OpenLayers and Ext JS. OpenLayers is an open source JavaScript library that enables ‘slippy maps’ to be embedded in any web application. OpenLayers allows communication with most standards-compliant web map services such as ESRI’s ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server and GeoServer, as well as other sources such as GoogleMaps. As an open source framework, OpenLayers separates map tools from map data and enables developers to include layers from several different sources in the same map. Ext JS is a visual framework which offers customizable website pieces (or widgets) that can be easily added, updated, and changed to fit a website’s design.

Shifting PhillyHistory.org from a Microsoft ASP.NET – only framework to one powered by not only ASP.NET but OpenLayers and Ext JS as well, was not a completely smooth affair. Several of the bumps in the road came from learning how to use OpenLayers and Ext JS effectively. While both are written using JavaScript objects, each has its own methods to drive its functionality. Getting a handle on a new framework involves learning how different objects are connected, how they communicate and how to get them to perform at their best. But the result is stunning, smooth, and allows for easy-to-use functionalities. Let us know what you think!

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Azavea Wins Another Prestigious SBIR Award from NSF for HunchLab – Leveraging Spatial Statistics to Validate Human Intuition and Fight Crime

By Megan Heckert Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 2, April 2008

"The ability to detect and analyze changes in the geographic patterns of crime and disorder is an innovation in policing which holds the potential to enhance the organizational capacity of police departments across the country."

Just over a year ago, we proudly announced that Azavea had been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the development of our HunchLab product, a set of innovative software tools that scour the current and historic data of a police department, search for changes in geographic patterns, apply spatial statistics to test for significance, and send alerts to relevant law enforcement personnel. Today, we are thrilled to announce that NSF has awarded us Phase II funding to further development of this software and its commercialization.

Our Phase I project proved the feasibility of building the application, and the Phase II project will refine the application and build additional functionality, including alternate workflows for different user types, developing a new user interface, expanding the alert infrastructure, and building text mining capabilities. The result will be a commercial version of the software.

Preventing crime is a more sophisticated task than simply mapping incidents or arrests and deploying resources accordingly. The ability to detect and analyze changes in the geographic patterns of crime and disorder is an innovation in policing which holds the potential to enhance the organizational capacity of police departments across the country.

HunchLab was inspired by the Crime Spike Detector that Azavea developed to help the Philadelphia Police Department identify when and where unusual increases in crime are occurring. Read our white paper for more information. 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. .

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, real estate sales, and property and mortgage fraud.

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-0750507).

This is the fourth time in two years that Azavea has been awarded an SBIR grant. Previous awards were SBIR Phase I awards from the National Science Foundation, the U.S Department of Education and the U.S Department of Agriculture.

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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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Mapping the Du Bois Philadelphia Negro

By Michael McLarnon Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 2, April 2008

In 1896 sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was invited by the University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia’s College Settlement Association to conduct a survey that was the basis for the 1899 book, The Philadelphia Negro. The survey focused on blacks living in the seventh ward, defined as the area in Center City between Spruce Street and South Street, from Seventh Street east to the Schuylkill River.

Du Bois lived in Philadelphia for a year during which he went door-to-door, interviewing each of the several thousand black households. He classified each of them by social class according to his own judgment and used colors to represent each group on a map of the seventh ward. Unfortunately, the actual individual data he collected in 1896 no longer exists. What we do have, however, is a map that he produced, showing the social class for the households in this area.

A historic W.E.B DuBois map (c. 1896) mapping data on blacks living in Philadelphia’s 7th ward.

In 2005 a group at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, led by project director, Amy Hillier – Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning in the School of Design, began collecting and mapping historical demographic and spatial data about Philadelphia’s old seventh ward at the time of Du Bois’ study. Their goal for the project, called “Mapping the Du Bois Philadelphia Negro” and funded by the National Endowment for Humanities, was to use historical data in a modern GIS system to allow scholars and students to explore the historic area of the seventh ward and the people who lived there, and perform their own analyses, in much the same way that Du Bois himself would have. Additionally, the “Mapping Du Bois” team hopes to provide valuable research tools to middle- and high-school students in order for them to more clearly understand the black experience in Philadelphia at the turn of the century.

Azavea was invited to partner with “Mapping the Du Bois Philadelphia Negro” to develop a web application that would enable the recently collected project data to be viewed and analyzed spatially by users. The application uses ESRI’s ArcGIS Server software as a mapping engine and the ESRI’s WebADF for the inclusion of dynamic maps on the web site. Click here to access the beta version of the application (best viewed in IE). A complete version of the application with even more exciting features will be released in a few weeks… so stay tuned!

The application gives students the opportunity to map many different data points, such as race, immigrant status, and household population, across the old seventh ward. Users can simultaneously view the data on modern GIS analysis map layers as well as on the historic maps Du Bois created. Development on the map is ongoing, but one of the chief challenges has been the shape of the Old Seventh Ward – it is a wide strip the cuts across the south edge of what we would now consider ‘Center City’, but is only a few blocks high. This has required a web interface that is a bit different from the norm.

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Azavea at ESRI Business Partner Conference: Some Great Highlights of Our Work

By Rachel Cheetham-Richard Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 2, April 2008

Among some of the Azavea projects highlighted at the ESRI Business Partner Conference: Cicero, Committee of Seventy’s Election Day Incident Mapping, ParcelExplorer, and DecisionMaps.

What better way to spend St. Patrick’s Day than sipping a cool and delicious martini on the beach in sunny California? Well … we decided to spend our time in a more productive way and attended the ESRI Business Partner Conference. A much more intimate conference than the International User Conference, the Business Partner Conference is a terrific setting for networking, seeing colleagues and old friends, checking what other companies are doing in the field and what innovative solutions are being developed, hearing about ESRI’s software developments and company’s direction, learning how, as ESRI Business Partners, we can leverage ESRI’s marketing and Business Partnership program’s benefits, and getting exclusive insider information, sales strategies, and trends about specific industries.

In the process, we were really proud to see some of our current work being highlighted on large video screens during the conference plenary and on the map wall: Cicero, our address-based legislative district boundary and elected official lookup, which is at the heart of some pretty interesting election-based projects right now; and ParcelExplorer, the web-based parcel data search and mapping system we built for the Philadelphia Department of Records. During the plenary, we were also happily surprised and pleased when the ESRI team highlighted the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office of Information Services (MOIS) and Azavea as an example of successful partnership between a Local Government agency and an ESRI Business Partner. This is not the first time ESRI recognized the excellent GIS work that Philadelphia has been doing. In 2006, MOIS had won ESRI’s Special Achievement in GIS for the DecisionMaps application we helped them build.

All in all, even if we didn’t end up on the beach sipping martinis, we had a really productive trip and are certainly looking forward to the ESRI User Conference in August.

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Azavea Continues to Grow!

By Abby Fretz Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 2, April 2008

Sean McGinnis and Reed Lauber in Philadelphia
(mmm… someone went a bit crazy with Photoshop!)

Reed Lauber joins Azavea as a Software Developer and will be working with the ‘Land Records’ team. He has over six years of experience building web-based applications. He recently has worked on a series of products for college Student Employment offices to help students find jobs and record their time worked. Reed enjoys music, movies, cooking and eating great food, beer and wine, tennis, and Flash games. Reed also spends a lot of his spare time tinkering with new web application ideas.

Sean McGinnis joins Azavea as a Project Manager. He will be working on a variety of projects, focusing initially on our HunchLab and ‘Land Records’ projects. He most recently worked at Civil Solutions where he was a Project Manager/Senior GIS Specialist. While there he was responsible for designing and developing business processes for specific geospatial applications and designing, implementing, and managing enterprise GIS stacks for public, private, and nonprofit organizations. Outside of work, Sean likes hiking with his wife and dog, whitewater kayaking, rock climbing, brewing and drinking beer, and cooking for friends (not always in that order).

We continue to seek qualified candidates for two additional positions – Software Developer and Software Tester. We are looking for colleagues who are curious, open-minded, or wish to contribute to their community, and make a difference through their work at Azavea. We welcome candidates from all walks of life and value diversity in our company. Available positions are thought-provoking, challenging, rewarding, full-time, and offer a competitive salary and stellar benefit package. Visit the ‘Careers’ page on our website for more information.

To apply, please send your answers to our applicant questionnaire, your cover letter and resume to Abby Fretz.

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Puzzle: PhillyHistory – Explore Historic Maps of Philadelphia

By Deb Boyer Published in

Vol. 3 Issue 2, April 2008

Azavea is excited to introduce a brand new search page for Sajara and the addition of 5,000 maps to PhillyHistory.org. In honor of the new maps (and just because we love all things geographical), get your map and street finding skills ready for this month’s puzzle!

1. PhillyHistory.org features a volume of the historical Hexamer & Locher maps courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia and the digital scanning center at the Philadelphia Athenaeum. Head to www.phillyhistory.org and search for the intersection of 4th Street and Market Street. Find the Hexamer & Locher Plate 11A map from 1860.

What is the name of the street that used to connect 4th Street and 5th Street just south of Market Street? Hint: It’s also a synonym for a businessperson.

2. Although that street existed in 1860, records show that its name changed. Head to the DOR Historic Streets Index and search for the name of the street. The section of this street from 4th Street to 5th Street just south of Market Street had a name change recorded in 1897.

What was the new name of the street? Hint: It still exists in that location under that name.

3. Since 1895, a landmark Philadelphia building has sat in this same area from 4th to 5th Street just south of Market. On PhillyHistory.org, enter the intersection of 4th Street and the street you found in #2 to find a photo of this building on the National Register of Historic Places.

What is the name of the building located at the intersection? Hint: A food court is now located in this building.

Be the first to send an email with all three correct answers to info@azavea.com and we will send you a $25 gift card to Barnes & Noble!

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