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MetroPhilaMapper users can quickly create maps without any prior experience using mapping software. Map can be customized through the selection of indicator and geographic area, as well as the number and style of class breaks, the color ramp, and the visible map layers.
MetroPhilaMapper offers a variety of other analytic tools, including reports, tables, statistics, scatter charts and ranked lists.
MetroPhilaMapper uses the Kaleidocade Indicators Framework (KIF) to combine mapping and statistics to enable users to visualize and interact with indicator data about the Greater Philadelphia region.
Client: Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project, Temple University
Challenge: The Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project (MPIP) at Temple University publishes a report on the health of the Greater Philadelphia region annually. The data they track encompass a wealth of social, environmental, and economic indicators portraying the quality of life in local communities gathered from dozens of different data sources.
Using funding from the William Penn Foundation, MPIP wanted to develop a web-based tool that community and civic organizations, governmental officials, researchers, students, and private citizens could use to explore this data in order to answer questions about the socioeconomic state of the region. The Greater Philadelphia region spans a multi-state area, so the system would have to be able to handle data for the cities of Philadelphia and Camden plus the Pennsylvania counties of Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery, and the New Jersey counties of Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, and Salem.
Solution: MPIP chose to build MetroPhilaMapper using Azavea’s Kaleidocade Indicators Framework (KIF). MetroPhilaMapper makes all of the data from MPIP’s previously published reports available online. Users can interact with MetroPhilaMapper’s data via a variety of analysis tools, including maps, tables, and charts.
MetroPhilaMapper contains over 520,000 records for almost 350 indicators grouped into 16 categories. The indicators are aggregated at six geographic levels including municipalities (with and without Planning Analysis Sections), zip codes, high school districts, elementary school districts, and census tracts.
Outcomes: Since it was released in 2008, MetroPhilaMapper has been accessed by over 2000 users, successfully broadening the access to MPIP’s data. The ability to interact with this data has been wildly popular, especially the mapping capabilities, which account almost 40% of all user activity in the system. Reports and tables are the next most popular forms of analysis. MetroPhilaMapper has also enabled MPIP staff to add new data to the Web site throughout the year as it becomes available.
Michelle Schmitt, project coordinator at MPIP, said, “The addition of MetroPhilaMapper to our project has converted our audience from consumers to creators of information. Before they could just read our reports to learn what we think about what is going on in the region. Now with MetroPhilaMapper, they can ask their own questions and come up with their own answers.”
Website: http://mpip.temple.edu/exploredata