People like to know what goes on in their neighborhoods. Most of us want to know if a new family is moving in down the block, if a store is closing or a new business opening, and, perhaps more than these, we want to know if any crimes have been committed nearby. And when it comes to something as important as crime, we want that information from a credible source. While police departments across the country record this information, it is generally only used internally by police personnel. In recent years a relatively small number of city police departments have started making the data available to the public.

Philadelphia’s Police Department (PPD) is now one of these select police departments. In response to widespread public concerns about crime in the city, Mayor Nutter and Police Commissioner Ramsey charged the Police Department with creating a public website where city residents can map the incidence of major crimes in Philadelphia. Based on our previous work with crime analysis applications (such as Crime Spike Detector and PhiCAMS), the PPD selected Azavea to develop the system. Working closely with the Police Department and the Mayor’s Office of Information Services (MOIS), we were able to get the application up and running in just six weeks.

The emphasis of the site is on simple, accurate display of crime occurrence across the city in a “pin map” style. All crime data is fed nightly to the site directly from Philadelphia Police Department’s databases. Up to 30 days worth of crime can be viewed simultaneously and a data download feature enables anyone to extract and download the data for more rigorous analysis.

One of the greatest challenges in creating the site was the need to display even relatively high volume of crimes at every scale. For example, theft is the most numerous of the so-called “Part 1″ crimes (the more serious crimes). Viewing thefts city-wide, for a typical thirty-day period, may result in 3,000 or more data points. The map depicting this situation would simply be a mass of undifferentiated points, which is not useful to anyone.

To address this concern, the site uses a common cartographic technique of “aggregation” – taking many points concentrated in the same geography and lumping them together into a single larger point, sized proportionately to the number of points it represents. This is analogous to the size of points used to represent the population of cities in many atlases. The website computes these new aggregations “on-the-fly” depending on how close or far one has zoomed into the map. There are several techniques for accomplishing this type of task. We used the ‘K-means clustering‘ approach which is a method for finding the centers of natural clusters.

We are excited by this new initiative and hope the public will find it useful. Visit http://citymaps.phila.gov/crimemap to check out the application or your neighborhood.

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.

For years, residents seeking heath and human service assistance in the Delaware Valley have faced a maze of options like Medicare, county assistance, Social Security, disability programs, job training, and drug counseling – with no single source for information about them. Without an easy alternative, many people would turn to 911 as a way to get answers, in some cases, overburdening county emergency call systems.

Azavea partnered with the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children (DVAEYC) and six United Way organizations serving Southeastern Pennsylvania to develop Connect211.org, a web-based application that enables the public and social workers to find and route their way to more than 12,000 organizations and service providers for health, family, education, employment, food, and shelter in the region.

Visitors to the site can easily identify service providers based on where they live and can use the routing function to plan a trip between their homes and the providers they have selected. In addition to driving directions, the system also includes bus, subway, and train routes on the maps. Users can search the database for services at a range of geographic levels including county, township, zip code, neighborhood, and distance from a specific address. Results are listed by address and displayed on a map that enables users to select specific search results, zoom in and out, and pan in any direction. DVAEYC updates the data and service provider information on an ongoing basis to fill in gaps. Connect211.org is free and for Philadelphia residents who lack access to the internet, the Free Library of Philadelphia has provided a Connect211.org link on its computers.

While the application uses Microsoft .Net framework, Microsoft SQL Server, ESRI’s ArcIMS, ArcSDE and ArcWeb Services, a few years have passed since we originally developed it and the technology has evolved, so we are currently working with DVAEYC and the United Way to build a Phase II for Connect211.org that will leverage more contemporary technology.

Committee of Seventy’s Election Oversight Program. This April, Pennsylvania’s unusually hotly-contested presidential primary provided a backdrop for a new and improved incident mapping project – this time moved from the desktop to the web.

With the expectation of higher-than-usual voter turnout and a large number of newly registered voters, Committee of Seventy and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law anticipated a busy day in their hotline command center. While the desktop-created maps Azavea prepared in November were very helpful, they had limited utility on the ground, as incidents were unfolding. They hoped that a web-based mapping application would enable closer to real-time analysis and enable volunteers to access incident information from the field.

With funding from the William Penn Foundation, the Committee of Seventy and Azavea were able to design and build a proof-of-concept application to address some of the basic needs of the Election Oversight Program. Using a mix of open source software tools including Google Maps, Open Layers, GeoServer and PostGIS (read the article on PostGIS below), we built an application that enabled rapid data entry as incident information was received and easy search by incident types. Without time to build the full functionality we’d eventually like to see in this application, we continued to use the ArcView-based system to create aggregated maps showing the number of incidents in each ward, State House, and State Senate District.

April 22nd was a busy day for volunteers and Azavea staff at the command center, with well over 400 incidents reported (more than three times the calls fielded during last November’s general election). Interspersed among calls to inquire about polling place locations were numerous complaints of missing registrations and registrations mysteriously showing a new party affiliation, people unable to vote because someone else had already voted in their name, and a few voters who felt intimidated by poll workers or campaign volunteers. With the website projected on the command center wall, each new incident added a little color and another interesting bit of information illustrating Philadelphia’s primary election.

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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Andrew Jennings joins Azavea as a Software Developer. He will start out assisting our Operations Manager with systems projects and providing quality assurance/software testing for the developers. Andrew spent five years at PENN Medicine‘s office of Development and Alumni Relations, where he rolled out a telecommuting program, helped implement an Active Directory infrastructure, developed databases to assist the fund raisers, and “fixed” a lot of monitors and printers by plugging them in. He’s currently wrapping up his Master of Computer and Information Technology degree at the University of Pennsylvania and is excited to help the pros at Azavea develop applications. Andrew enjoys bad horror movies and good science fiction novels. He doesn’t enjoy being bested in online games by teenagers with better reflexes, but it’s a regular occurrence.

Tamara Manik-Perlman joins Azavea as a GIS Intern and will be supporting the Cicero team, researching and gathering new, updated spatial data and maintaining the Cicero Elected Official database. She’s currently finishing her Master’s in Geography at Temple University, where her research interests are focused on the geography of immigrant health and the changing relationship between government and the nonprofit sector. As a freelance GIS consultant, she recently worked on a project in which she mapped data from the Blueprint for a Safer Philadelphia hotline and analyzed the relationship between caller needs, program locations, and target neighborhoods. While it seems hard to remember a time before graduate school, Tamara has also worked as an editor and at environmental and health non-profits. Off the clock, she spends her time knitting, printmaking, and cooking vegetarian feasts from locally-grown, organic produce. When she’s not wearing out her passport traveling to far-flung corners of the earth, Tamara takes every opportunity to extol the virtues of South Philadelphia.

We continue to seek qualified candidates for two positions - Software Developer and Software Tester and have recently opened a new (temporary, 4 to 6 months long) Web Developer position. We are looking for colleagues who are curious, open-minded, and 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.


Join Megan, Abby, Rich, Keith, Robert, Chip, David (during the dedication of his ‘Geese’ sculpture), Jeff, and Michael for our monthly Brown Bag Lunches! Not in the pictures: Aaron, Reed, Andrew, Sean, Dave, Cecelia, Josh, Carissa, Deb, Rachel, Tamara, and Dana.

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

Robert, Michael and other volunteers help paint the Du Bois mural on 6th & South Streets.

Philadelphia has been called America’s “City of Murals”. The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program (MAP) started in 1984 as a component of the Anti-Graffiti Network. Since then, the Mural Arts Program has produced over 2,700 murals throughout Philadelphia. So when Amy Hillier, Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, and Project Director for the “Mapping the Du Bois Philadelphia Negro” project told us that MAP was dedicating a mural to the South Philly historically black fire station, Engine 11, and to the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois in that neighborhood, we jumped – Robert, Michael and his girlfriend on their bikes, and I…on the bandwagon…(I don’t bike) – to give a hand to the dozens of volunteers who helped paint the mural.

After playing with ESRI’s ArcGIS Server and WebADF to build the “Mapping the Du Bois Philadelphia Negro” application, what fun to be changing gears to play with brushes and paint with passers-by, local children and artists!

For more information on the “Mapping Du Bois Philadelphia Negro”, visit: http://www.azavea.com/newsletter/v3i2/Azavea_Journal_Vol3_Issue2_April.html

Photo used courtesy of the City of Philadelphia’s Water Department. www.phillyhistory.org

Occasionally, as the PhillyHistory.org team is posting historic photographs to PhillyHistory.org (from the Philadelphia Department of Records’ City Archives collection or the recently added Philadelphia Water Department collection), we come across some beautiful, bizarre, and sometimes inexplicable images. The photograph above is a great example of one of these discoveries.

This month’s puzzle is a bit different from our typical newsletter puzzles. We’re asking you to awaken the right side of your brain and come up with a creative caption describing what you think might be happening in the above photograph.

Head to www.phillyhistory.org to explore the photo collections of the City of Philadelphia Department of Records‘ City Archives and of the Philadelphia Water Department.

Send your caption to info@azavea.com. The winner (chosen by the super-saavy PhillyHistory.org team) will receive a $25 gift card to Barnes & Noble! The winning caption will also be published in our next newsletter.