Walkshed NY: Set your preferences and get a heat map of the most walkable areas in New York City that match your priorities.

Azavea has promoted open data initiatives by government for many years. We saw NYC BigApps as a great opportunity for us to demonstrate our commitment to building web-based applications that can both promote transparency and help our cities and communities operate in a more sustainable manner. In early October we held an internal competition to generate a series of ideas that would leverage the mountain of newly available NYC Data Mine data sets. Aaron Ogle’s proposal to extend his personal R&D project to NYC prevailed, and we set out to make it happen. Walkshed NYC is an expansion of our prototype walkability calculation and mapping web application, Walkshed Philadelphia.  The Walkshed New York app uses the following data layers from the NYC Data Mine:

• Restaurants
• Farmers Markets
• Coffee Shops
• PATH stops
• Parks and Recreation locations

• Playgrounds
• Cultural Centers
• WiFi Hotspots
• Libraries
• Post Offices

Aaron Ogle, the lead developer for Walkshed writes, “Walkshed enables users to make very precise and personal walkability calculations. Every distance we measure is an actual walking distance, rather than a distance calculated ‘as the crow flies’.  We give you enough data to make intelligent choices.  Walkability is not only proximity to basic amenities but also considers crime density, tree cover, and more.  Since Walkshed is built on DecisionTree, Azavea’s planning and geographic prioritization tool, users have the ability to set their priorities and create a walkshed that is tailored to their preferences.”

But measuring a city’s walkability is just the beginning.  Planning water sources, land use, optimal public transit routes, better sidewalk networks and bike lanes, traffic light timing, and distance from diverse habitats are just a few of the ways that geographic technology can help us promote more sustainable economies and environment.

Click this button to vote (short login will be required)

So, here’s where you come in.  The BigApps competition is awarding prizes based on two rounds of voting. The Popular Choice Award is based on votes received from public users of the competition site (here).  If you dig what we’re doing, please support us by visiting the site and voting for Walkshed New York! Voting opens on December 15 and closes January 7, 2010.  The second series of prizes will be determined by a panel of judges.

Thank you for your support!  If you’d like to give us feedback on Walkshed NY please contact Aaron Ogle at aogle@azavea.com.

“Pretty excited” turned out to be an understatement. People loved that they could use Sajara’s geographic search feature to locate historic photos of their neighborhoods. We began receiving wonderful comments and stories from PhillyHistory.org users.

We loved hearing the stories but unfortunately did not have an easy way for users to share their comments with the larger PhillyHistory community. We decided to remedy the problem by adding a new feature to Sajara – a public commenting panel.

New Sajara commenting panel in use on PhillyHistory.org

Enabled on a collection basis, commenting provides a way for the public to share information or opinions about an image with other users via a comment page on the detail view for each photo.  After creating an account with PhillyHistory.org, users can leave comments about the image, respond to comments left by other users, or report abusive comments.  A user’s comment is associated with their user name, and each user name is linked to a public profile for that user.  While a user’s comments are shown by default on their user page, the user can also choose to display their favorite photos, bookmarked searches, and personal information such as a biography or website.  In addition, a user can also sign up to receive other users’ future comments via an RSS feed.

Actually implementing the commenting system turned out to be somewhat complicated.  There are a few different ways to organize comments, including a flat list that shows comments in the order they were entered and a nested tree that shows all the relationships between comments and responses to comments.  Getting it right means understanding your audience.  Our approach with the Sajara software organizes comments into single-tier threads so that users can see simple conversations but not get lost sorting through which ones relate to others.

Sajara commenting feature in the Japanese Gardens of the World sample application of the Sajara software

Commenting systems require quite a lot of ongoing management as well.  Some comments will need reviewing for various reasons, which, on a high volume site, can be an overwhelming task.  Included in the Sajara commenting system are a set of tools that allow the site’s administrators to easily review and handle all the site’s comments.

The public commenting feature is currently available on PhillyHistory.org and Japanese Gardens of the World, the Sajara sample application, and is an optional feature for future Sajara implementations.

Big Map search window in the new version of Sajara

Oh! … and by the way, have you seen the new ‘Big Map’ search window we implemented in PhillyHistory.org (also a new option in Sajara)?  The map view search page features a nearly full screen map with thumbnails of the images displayed along the bottom of the screen.  Flags on the map correspond with each thumbnail, indicating where the photo was taken.  All the original search filters (address, keyword, topics, dates, and more) are still available at the top of the map under the ‘Search By’ menu.

Check both new features out and let us know what you think!

Our new Batch Geocoding and District Matching service uses the same Cicero API we provide for developers, but it enables you to send us a database of addresses (as an Excel spreadsheet for instance), and we’ll return your addresses to you stamped with all of the districts you request as well as any legislator contact information.  And this is all at an affordable price.  The data returned with your addresses can include:

• Geocoded coordinates for each address
• Local, State and Federal legislative district id’s for the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand
• Elected official name, contact information, etc.
• Non-legislative district id’s such as counties, school districts, watersheds, police districts, etc.

This is just the first step. We are working on more ways to use Cicero including integration with Salesforce.com and an online batch district matching service, so stay tuned for more developments.

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!

Sarah Pierro joins Azavea also as a GIS Analyst and will be working with Mike at the Philadelphia Water Department. She most recently worked at the County of Hunterdon in New Jersey as a GIS Specialist.  While employed at the county, she was responsible for updating and correcting municipal boundaries, editing parcel and easement information, as well as designing custom maps for the public.  On her down time, Sarah enjoys snowboarding, traveling, photography and live music.

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ESRI Federal User Conference 2010
Washington, DC – February 17 – 19
We’ve submitted some abstracts, but aren’t sure what we’re presenting.  It’ll be good, though

Space-Time Modeling and Analysis Conference
Redlands, CA – February 22 – 23
Robert Cheetham submitted a presentation on HunchLab

CSIN: Canadian Sustainability Indicators Network
Toronto, ON – March 2 – 5
Robert Cheetham presenting on siting businesses based on geographic sustainability factors

2010 ESRI Worldwide Business Partner Conference and Developer Summit
Palm Springs, CA – March 21 – 23
Sean McGinnis and Robert Cheetham attending

NJAEO – New Jersey Association of Election Officials
Atlantic City, NJ – March 22 – 24
Waiting for paperwork so we can attend

AWRA: American Water Resources Association Conference
Orlando, FL – March 29 – 31
Mary Johnson exhibiting Sajara for Water, Sewer and Stormwater Infrastructure Management

NTEN Non Profit Technology Conference 2010
Atlanta, GA – April 8 – 10
Jeremy Heffner and Robert Cheetham attending and exhibiting at the Science Fair Expo
Robert presenting on Advanced GIS for Non-Profits

Museums and the Web 2010
Denver, CO – April 13 – 17
Deb Boyer and Carissa Brittain exhibiting Sajara

Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting
Washington, DC – April 14 – 18
Dana Bauer presenting “A Geographically-Weighted Regression Analysis of Green Space and Socioeconomic Character in the Delaware Valley”
Robert Cheetham presenting HunchLab:  Spatial Data Mining for Intelligence-driven Policing