While this proved to be an effective method, the criteria used in generating the Priority Areas was static and only suited to examine a particular aspect of what makes communities flourish.  Instead, what if the disparate sources of demographic, economic and social service data were brought together in such a way that anyone could create their own priority areas based on the factors of their own choosing?  Neighborhoods could be analyzed by service organizations to see where the highest needs for their services were required, and as the data is updated, the same tool could be used to determine the effectiveness of the services provided.  Similarly for determining potential business and economic investments, real estate decisions and municipal services: if the data is available and tools for analysis provided, the power to identify and direct the future wellbeing of Toronto’s neighborhoods is opened to a wider audience, increasing awareness and promoting greater civic participation.  It was therefore vital to develop a common fact base over time that could be used for place-based decision-making across all service perspectives.  It was also determined that this “fact base”, include all neighborhoods across the City ofToronto, and not just the 13 priority areas.

Drawing on our experience developing data visualization and decision making tools such as our Kaleidocade Indicators Framework and DecisionTree products, Azavea was hired by the City of Toronto to develop a web based mapping and measurement tool to help gauge wellbeing amongst Toronto’s neighborhoods.  The result, Wellbeing Toronto, combines a list of over 150 (and growing) indicators of wellbeing and the corresponding data for each of the city’s 140 neighborhoods.  The datasets are grouped into 10 categories including Demographics, Health, Safety, Transportation and Environment.  Users are able to select up to 20 indicators, and the website generates a thematic map showing how strongly the set of indicators is represented in each neighborhood.  The selected indicators can be further weighted so that the values of certain indicators are more heavily represented in the map.  In addition to the map analysis, the application also produces tabular data showing the exact values of each selected indicator for each neighborhood.  Charts and graphs showing the distribution of an indicator set and statistical information on each indicator are available as well.  For further analysis, a variety of geographic reference points, such as day care centers, police stations, public transit locations – from up to seven categories – can be overlaid on the thematic map.

All geographic data is accessed through the City of Toronto’s ESRI ArcGIS Server infrastructure.  The website itself is built using the latest open source JavaScript technologies, including jQuery and the OpenLayers web mapping framework.  Several components in the OpenLayers project that allow it to operate with ESRI’s ArcGIS products were developed and contributed by Azavea.  The back-end application supports the web app with a REST API developed with Java, and several open source GIS toolkits, Java Topology Suite and GeoTools.

The application was launched to much excitement in early July, and received a considerable amount of television and newspaper press.  There were nearly 18,000 unique visitors on its initial launch day alone, making it the most popular page on the toronto.ca domain for the day.  The application is also a triumph for the City of Toronto in its commitment to Open Data policies, as well as fostering a comprehensive understanding of neighborhood wellness across a broad range of perspectives.  Instead of fearing the exposure that comes with transparency, the Wellbeing Toronto application proves that putting the data and the tools in the hands of the public can engage people in their own communities to evaluate and assess the wellbeing of the neighborhoods in which they live, work and play.

Important Links:

Main page: http://www.toronto.ca/wellbeing/
Tutorial: http://www.toronto.ca/wellbeing/tutorial.htm
FAQ: http://www.toronto.ca/wellbeing/faq.htm
Description: http://www.toronto.ca/wellbeing/about.htm

Public Safety IT – article featuring how Hunchlab is used by the Philadelphia Police Department and the Tacoma Police Department.

Next American City – article on planning 2.0 and collaborative platforms for actionable intelligence, featuring the City of Asheville’s Priority Places application, powered by DecisionTree

Priority Places, is an example of empowering the public to make decisions about finding the best places to live and work  — Ahmed Abukhater, Esri Global Industry Manager for Community Development,  Next American City

Reading Eagle – article on legislative redistricting featuring Azavea’s research on gerrymandering in Pennsylvania.

The Enterprise Blog – article on redistricting featuring GMU’s Public Mapping Project and Azavea’s open-source mapping software, District Builder.

WHYY RadioTimes - interview with Robert Cheetham about census data and redistricting.

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.

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!

I am very excited about my Azavea research project on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a technology from Amazon Inc. that is shifting a lot of people’s ideas about what computing is and can do. Amazon EC2 has arisen through the confluence of technological innovations of the past few years.

First some background. One of the most basic pieces of infrastructure in the World Wide Web today is the ubiquitous entity known as “The Server”. This term is used for a computer which performs some task or tasks on behalf of other computers. For example, web pages come from a web “server”, which sends web pages to your computer for you to see. Moreover this web server may in turn query other servers to complete this request — contact a database server to get data or geospatial server to produce a map image for example.

The idea behind a computing “cloud” (and there are others — as referenced in Robert’s ‘What the Heck is…” article above) is a bunch of computers accessible from the internet which “instantiate” whole virtual computers — with all their associated operating systems, software, data, etc. — that can be accessed on demand. One can instantiate one of these machines, connect to it via the internet through standard remote connection protocols, and voila! your screen shows the desktop for this “computer” that behaves exactly as if it were sitting under your desk.

While for desktops, this approach is odd, for servers there can be many benefits. With a few clicks of a mouse, multiple copies of the same server can be up and running at the same time to handle increases in demand. They can be shut down again when not needed. The details and headaches of actually running and owning physical machinery are offloaded to the cloud provider. The cloud provider also provides bandwidth. Once you have a working version of a website, database, or geospatial server, it can be copied and reused — no need to start from scratch with configuration.

For my research project, I am exploring the use of The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as a resource for some of Azavea projects already in use. DecisionTree, our geographic prioritization web system, was an ideal first candidate. This product requires strong computing resources and was designed from the ground up to be able to run on multiple computers. With EC2 we were able to run DecisionTree on 10 instances at once, dramatically speeding up its operations and providing a mechanism for running DecisionTree for customers who do not want to maintain their own server infrastructure.

In addition to DecisionTree, we are also experimenting with running our Cicero legislative and election data service on EC2 as well as other ways to leverage the Amazon Web Services. For example, last spring, we tested a map image ’tile cache’ service that will generate and store a set of map tiles, enabling an organization to reduce bandwidth usage and improve responsiveness of a high traffic web mapping application. While EC2 was originally limited to Linux-based software, the recent addition of Windows Server as a target platform has provided much more flexibility. Do you have ideas for how you could use Amazon Web Services for your GIS project? Let us know.

How does your organization go about visualizing geographic factors that are inherently linked to the success or feasibility of a project? How do you determine what optimal areas of a city, a neighborhood, or street are, in order to meet the objectives of your project, such as deciding where to start a business, opening a new branch of your company, making real estate investments, improving service delivery, optimizing direct-mail or grass-root campaigns or canvassing efforts?

Most of us don’t have a crystal ball that answers these questions. Determining what confluence of geographic factors will be most helpful for you to identify optimal locations for your activities can feel like you’re shooting in the dark. Well, you can sleep better now. Our set of web-based planning and prioritization tools, DecisionTree®, has been designed to alleviate this “shoot-in-the-dark” syndrome.

Why don’t you try it, play with it, shake it up a little and let us know what you think? We have launched two demos as part of our brand new DecisionTree website. One is an Elections and Advocacy demo, the other is targeted at Economic Development. Remember that every single weight preference as part of the calculations is completely customizable.

Lastly, we are pleased to report that the City of Asheville’s Priority Places, built on the DecisionTree platform, just won a prestigious economic development award. Learn more in the article below.

As mentioned in an article above, one of our clients, the City of Asheville, North Carolina, recently won the prestigious ‘Excellence in Economic Developmen’t award in the ‘New Media Initiative’ category from the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) for its mapAsheville’s Priority Places, an interactive economic development mapping tool created to strenghten investment within their region. The City of Asheville’s Office of Economic Developement selected Azavea to design Priority Places to help its business owners, citizens, and government agencies weigh multiple geographic factors and generate web-based heat maps that highlight optimal locations for their activities.

Priority Places utilizes our DecisionTree® technology to provide the public with the ability to search and analyze key location factors based on custom weightable priorities and preferences which were established by officials at Asheville’s Office of Economic Development . The City of Asheville selected DecisionTree for their Priority Places application for its versatility, flexibilty, and the ability to permit any organization to choose its own custom weight criteria. Users are able to prioritize locations by assigning weights to the criteria of significance to them, using sliding bars. The system then calculates the locations that best meet the weighted criteria and returns a heat map ‘on the fly’.

Asheville’s implementation of DecisionTree is a powerful, real world example of how a city government is using it to address the challenge of processing and analyzing a large amount of geographic, demographic, and economic data with sufficient speed to run weighted raster overlay calculations on a publicly accessible website. DecisionTree’s simple user interface and distributed geoprocessing architecture enables anyone to set up a model and see the results in seconds. It also uses Adobe Flex technology, enabling greater user interactivity.

“As a technologist, I’ve been very pleased with the application and its ability to rapidly return analytical results to the user. As a government employee looking for new and creative ways to leverage existing operational data, it’s a treat to see so many things come together within Priority Places.”
—-Jason Mann, GIS & Application Services Manager for City of Asheville

The City of Asheville selected Azavea based on an early economic development prototype we created for the City of Philadelphia’s Neighborhood Transformation Initiative. The Philadelphia project led to a research grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop the high performance algorithms that enable DecisionTree to operate with sufficient speed to run on the Internet. In addition to support for economic development applications, DecisionTree can now support real estate decisions, business siting, and geographic prioritization of government services.

Congratulations to the City of Asheville! If you’d like to explore the Priority Places application go to http://gis.ashevillenc.gov/mapasheville/priorityplaces/

Here at Azavea we’ve been talking about CNN’s Magic Wall, a tour de force in election information visualization. With nerdy glee, correspondent John King brings to viewers the spatial drama of the presidential race, sweeping his hands across the Magic Wall (an oversized monitor powered by dozens of live data feeds) to highlight swing states, break down demographic data, and tabulate possible combinations of electoral votes.

For the past few years, we’ve been hard at work developing our own election tools and services, albeit on a smaller scale and with a focus on state and local elections. But our mission is grand: put the power of GIS and mapping into the hands of voters, grassroots campaign workers, and watchdog organizations.

Map displaying dispersment of campaign contribution sources to a state legislator.

Cicero , Azavea’s legislative district boundary and elected official web API, is a field guide to the geography of democracy. Cicero connects citizens to their local, state, and national representatives by tapping into a massive database of voting district maps and information about politicians, legislative bodies, and election events. The Cicero database has launched dozens of projects designed to help voters understand our current political landscape, including a study of gerrymandering in the United States, an analysis of in-district vs. out-of-district campaign donations, an election day lookup tool that provides users with constantly updated vote tallys, and Comcast’s Your Local Politics website.

To help grassroots campaigns hit the ground running, we’ve developed tools to quickly generate hundreds of canvassing maps that pinpoint likely voters and supervoters in each precinct. We’ve used our DecisionTree web-based geographic planning and prioritization tool to build a prototype Elections and Advocacy application to enable campaigns to prioritize canvassing and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts based on a selection of over 30 weighted electoral indicators including voting history, demographic data, and civic participation.

Map of election-day incidents that occurred in Philadelphia during the April 2008 primaries.

This November, we will continue to work with the Committee of Seventy, one of the oldest non-partisan political watchdog groups in the U.S., tracking election-day incidents – everything from voter intimidation to faulty equipment – at polling places throughout Philadelphia County. We launched this project last year during the mayoral race using PDF maps that were updated throughout the day. This year we built a real-time interactive web application that displays maps of election incidents as they are reported on screens at Committee of Seventy headquarters – our own version of a magic wall, if you will.

Web pages are, at some level, just a set of instructions that need to be interpreted by a web browser to make the picture on your screen. Differences in web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and the various versions of each (and even differences between the same versions on different operating systems) make it hard for web developers to provide a consistent experience to users. Abobe’s Flex is an open source collection of tools that help developers make consistent, rich Internet applications, independent of a person’s choice of browser.

Applications made with the Flex framework run in Flash Player, a common browser plug-in which has been around since the late 1990′s. Flash was initially a popular way to add interactive graphics, animations, or video to websites, but has evolved into a platform for developers to build entire web and desktop applications. Flex includes a standard set of user interface objects (such as buttons, forms, and the usual features that people expect to see on web and desktop applications), and an object-oriented programming model familiar to web developers. Flex makes it easier for a developer to create feature rich applications that operate consistently regardless of the user’s operating system or browser. While there are other similar platforms for web-based user interfaces, such as ExtJS (a JavaScript library we use) and Microsoft’s Silverlight, Flex is an excellent choice for applications that need animation or complex controls that push the bounds of what is possible in a web browser.

The Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive’s The Root – Example of a Flex- enabled mapping interface that lets users map their family trees.

Azavea has already used Flex in a couple different scenarios, both in and out of map applications. The “Roots” section of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive’s www.theroot.com uses Flex to display an interactive graphical family tree. While the data is stored in a conventional database and uses a conventional server behind-the-scenes, the interface is implemented in Flash using Flex and Flex-based diagramming tools. The Flex application interacts with the back-end server using web services (check out “What the Heck is a Web Service?”). Azavea’s DecisionTree uses Flex to power the interactive map page, providing enhanced browser interoperability and enhanced graphics, such as overlays with variable transparency that can be adjusted by the user on the fly.

We’re excited by what we’ve been able to do so far with Flex, and are looking forward to the forthcoming release of ESRI’s ArcGIS API for Flex, which brings the visual sparkle of Flex to ArcGIS Server applications.

Map of Azavea’s office showing an employee’s ideal desk location based on entering weighted preferences in DecisionTree.

The basic premise is that when individuals moved their desk, they will move toward something they desire, and away from something they don’t. If you are allergic to printer toner, you don’t want to sit next to the printers, and if you really like the sun, you definitely want to sit next to the windows. The ultimate location of an employee’s desk takes into account all sorts of factors, and comes to a solution that is often unique to the individual. Does this sound familiar? Indeed! Managing these types of decision factors is the basis for Azavea’s DecisionTree® framework.

Using these principles, it became apparent that software developer, David Zwarg’s research was well suited to address this problem. One of David’s ongoing research projects at Azavea is collaborating with Dana Tomlin at the University of Pennsylvania to develop an advanced raster cost-distance algorithm. The innovation behind this raster cost-distance algorithm is a wave propagation model, which is not constrained to the grid imposed on the raster data. Bonus!

To start, David picked some key landmarks in the new office, and generated a cost-distance raster for each of them. His list of raster datasets generated include: cost-distance to the refrigerator, cost-distance to the bike garage, cost-distance to the printers, cost-distance to the windows, and more. In all, there were 14 layers — or decision factors — that David was able to incorporate, based on the new office floor plan.

Next, he converted the raster datasets to the Azavea Raster Grid (ARG) format. What is this format, and why convert data from raster grids? ARG is a grid format that we use internally (not to be confused with “Argh!”, which is also used internally) and has been optimized for fast processing and storage speed, in addition to being the format used by DecisionTree.

Finally, David plugged the raster datasets into a demo DecisionTree application, and published the application on the Azavea Intranet a couple weeks prior to the completion of the office expansion. The application contains a base map that is the architectural floor plan of the new office space. Azavea staff members could now use DecisionTree to locate the places in the office that suited their preferences. Adjust a few sliders, click update, and the application shows the best place in the office, based on your criteria! No more guesswork required.

It’s exciting to see how our staff research bears fruit at unexpected times. Across the gamut, from Open Source projects to geoprocessing to pro-bono cartography, our staff research brings a wealth of experience to their work (and play) – who knows what will crop up next?

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.