We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the new version of our DecisionTree product. Over this past year, the DecisionTree team has made significant advances both in user interface design and in the architecture of our calculation engine, and it’s exciting to be ready to show them off.  If you want to check out what it looks like, we have both an Elections and Advocacy demo and an Economic Development demo.  Otherwise, read on to find out what we’ve changed.

If you’re not familiar with DecisionTree, take a look at our December 2008 newsletter to see an example of how the City of Asheville, NC has used it, or head over to the DecisionTree home page.  DecisionTree  is a set of innovative web-based planning and prioritization tools that can be used to help make geographic decisions.  In DecisionTree, users select and weight decision factors to find the areas that best meet the objectives of a project, be it siting a business, making real estate investments, improving service delivery, or optimizing direct-mail, political campaigns or fundraising efforts. And best of all, DecisionTree can be customized to leverage existing data and it’s simple and fast enough to run on the web.

So what’s new? The interface has had a top-to-bottom makeover to make it easier to use both for first-time and expert users.

• It now looks and feels more like a desktop application, with a ribbon-style interface along the top of the page that groups tools together with easy-to-identify icons.
• We’ve added a splash screen that introduces the basic concept of choosing factors to create a priority map as well as a tour that walks users through the basic functionality of the site. The workflow has changed to a simple step-by-step process in a single window.
• We’ve updated the styling and graphics to be more appealing as well as extremely customizable, enabling individual installations of DecisionTree to use colors, themes, and graphics that integrate well with organizations’ existing websites.

We’ve added several other features:

• A button to export a priority map into KML for viewing in Google Earth.
• Extended map navigation controls, and ways of saving and loading scenarios.
• Support for a range of new tiled base maps, from ESRI’s ArcGIS Online services to OpenStreetMap.

In terms of analysis, users can now limit the calculation to only a part of the map—such as a county or a tax incentive area—using a mask. They can also look at the individual priority map of each factor they’ve chosen, giving a better sense of how the composite map was generated.

Oh, and fellow geeks out there, you’ll be interested to know that there’s a lot of interesting new magic behind the scenes.  As software developers, we find DecisionTree to be a fascinating project to work on— it’s a distributed calculation engine that can split up individual requests across machines and processor cores to speed up each map calculation.  We’re continually improving the engine and making it easier to integrate into web applications.  Forgive my jargon here for a minute…  We used the Ruby on Rails framework to build a REST API to make it straightforward for other developers to build new user interfaces on top of the DecisionTree engine.  This interface is what Aaron Ogle, another Azavea developer, used to build the recently launched Walkshed application (see above) — definitely check it out if you haven’t yet.

We have two DecisionTree samples, one focused on elections in Philadelphia and another on economic development in the five-county Philadelphia region.  Take a look and let us know what you think!