A map of target investment locations based on a user’s selection of weighted preferences.

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/