Los Angeles County Enterprise GIS

Kenneth Bennett of RRCC passed a very interesting (though dense), thorough, and relevant article along, considering that redistricting will start in earnest next year.  As he states:

This is a well-written and balanced article on redistricting and GIS technology that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in 2005.  If you have the time, I encourage you to read it if you have not already done so.

Kenneth

PNAS Article (2005) by Benjamin Forest on Redistricting and GIS

September 28th, 2009 | Category: Case Studies, Technical | Leave a comment

Thanks to all who attended the EGIS Committee meeting on Tuesday 09/22/09.
Click HERE to view the powerpoint presentation in .pdf format (http://dpwgis.co.la.ca.us/website/egis/ladpwGoogleMapsApps.pdf)!

(Road Closures Application)

September 24th, 2009 | Tags: ESRI ArcGIS Server, Google Maps, Javascript API, Mashups, Power Point, REST Services | Category: Case Studies, Documents, Technical, Technique | Leave a comment

My favorite magazine ran a couple of articles recently that touch on the benefits of GIS.  I am including the text here, and recommending that everyone subscribe!

Link to a printable article here: Economist – Technology Quarterly – June 6th 2009 – Mapping a Better World.pdf

One interesting note – the map in the article suggests that childhood obesity may be a consequence of limited access to parks.  David Kwan from our Department of Public Health did an analysis of this, and the tale is much more complex.  Correlation is not causation ….

Mapping a better world

Jun 4th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Software: Interest groups around the world are using mapping tools and internet-based information sources to campaign for change

Areas with fewer parks (lighter rather than darker green) have higher rates of childhood obesity (larger red circles)

CONVINCING people about the evils of housing segregation can be tough, says Barbara Samuels, a campaigner for fair housing at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maryland. “People say, ‘What’s so bad about living in an all-black neighbourhood?’ ” she explains. But using a map that displays all the vacant houses in a segregated neighbourhood, how few jobs exist there and how little public transport is available, “you can show graphically how people are segregated from opportunity,” she says. “Maps help you take complex information and portray it in a clear, intuitive manner. You can show segregation in a way that talking about it doesn’t do.”

And compiling such maps is much easier than it used to be, thanks to new mapping tools and sources of information on the internet. Ms Samuels remembers, for example, the tedium of trying to draw basic data on maps by hand in the 1990s. But in 2005 she was able to use maps that displayed 14 indicators of opportunity-created for her by a mapping-technology specialist-to help win a housing-desegregation court case.

For most people it is merely a handy tool to find a nearby pizzeria or get directions to a meeting. But mapping technology has matured into a tool for social justice. Whether it is to promote health, safety, fair politics or a cleaner environment, foundations, non-profit groups and individuals around the world are finding that maps can help them make their case far more intuitively and effectively than speeches, policy papers or press releases.

“Today you are allowed to visualise data in ways you couldn’t even understand just a few years ago,” says Jeff Vining of Gartner, a consulting firm. Along with web-based resources, coalescence around more advanced tools has also helped, such as the emergence of ESRI, based in Redlands, California, as the market leader in mapping software. And the rise of open-source projects such as MapServer, PostGIS and GRASS GIS have made sophisticated mapping available to non-profit groups with limited resources.

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July 10th, 2009 | Category: Case Studies, News | Leave a comment

My favorite magazine ran a couple of articles recently that touch on the benefits of GIS.  I am including the text here, and recommending that everyone subscribe!

Link to a printable article here: Economist – Technology Quarterly – Julne 6th 2009 – Sensors and Sensitivity.pdf

Sensors and Sensitivity

Jun 4th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas

Figure 1 - InSTEDD

IF YOUR mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.

They could also be used to gather data in more direct ways. Sensors inside phones, or attached to them, could gather information about temperature, humidity, noise level and so on. More straightforwardly, people can send information from their phones, by voice or text message, to a central repository. This can be a useful way to gather data quickly during a disaster-relief operation, for example, or when tracking the outbreak of a disease. Engineers, biologists, sociologists and aid-workers are now building systems that use handsets to sense, monitor and even predict population movements, environmental hazards and public-health threats.

A good example is InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters), a non-profit group based in California, which promotes the use of mobile phones to improve developing countries’ ability to respond to disasters. Launched with seed money from Google’s philanthropic arm and the Rockefeller Foundation in late 2007, it has just released a suite of open-source software to share, aggregate and analyse data from mobile phones. Its first test-bed is Cambodia, where health-workers can send text messages, containing observations and diagnoses, to a central number.

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July 10th, 2009 | Category: Case Studies, News | Leave a comment

John Arnstein from my office linked me to a post about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) releasing its 2002 Cancer Risk Data.  The report shows maps by County, and he was interested in getting more granular.  So I went to the EPA’s site and was able to download an Access database containing information by Census Tract.  I then did some manipulation to pull out LA County and create a map of total risk by Census Tract.

LA County Cancer Map

Appears that Freeways seem to be the big drivers.  Here are some resources for making and checking this out yourself!

• LA County Total Risk Map (PDF format)
• Cancer Risk by Census Tract (shapefiles)
• Southern California Cancer Risk (Google Earth KMZ)
• Southern California Plant Locations impacting Air Toxicities (Google Earth KMZ)

To look at the source, methodology, and download more data, here is the EPA’s website.

June 24th, 2009 | Category: Announcements, Case Studies, GIS Data | Leave a comment

A couple of years ago, Brett Sanders from UC Irvine partnered with LA County’s Department of Public Works to investigate the value of using high resolution LIDAR (evelation) data to model flooding.  They modelled the 1963 Baldwin Hills Dam Break, which caused extensive damage in Los Angeles.

• Video showing the model of the Baldwin Hills Dam Break
• Short Slideshow of the project
• Link to source site for citation purposes
• Link to full paper (see #39)

To summarize, the process determined that high resolution data does improve the predictive abilities of their flood modelling systems.  At this point I would be interested in ideas that folks would have to fund the creation of a set of models for:

• All of the dams in the County with a different set of water heights.
• Tsunami inundation models based upon different scenarios.

With the County’s soon to be released Mass Notification providing a way to quickly contact people in danger, a better model for areas that will be impacted will help ensure that the information gets to the appopriate people first.  As well, it may be possible to use these models to more accurately determine FEMA flood zones, potentially saving County residents money on flood insurance requirements.

June 22nd, 2009 | Category: Case Studies, LAR-IAC, Technical | Leave a comment

The federal stimulus package contains HUGE amounts of money.  For citizens, a map interface can be a unique and understandable way to figure out WHERE (literally) their money is going.  I have found been linked to a couple of maps, which I think are a good start to where we can can go.

• From Mike Byrne, CA State GIO: Maryland Recovery Site
• From the AP: Transportation Projects by County

If you find any more, please add them via comments!

May 18th, 2009 | Category: Case Studies, Links, News | Leave a comment

In order to provide greater detail for the Sheriff about the potential for solar installations at Pitchess Detention Center, I have worked with the Sheriff to create a number of Options, and provided information about the potential for ground installations at that site.  I thought I would provide the files as an example of the Solar Potential Model that is behind the solar mapping site, showing information available to all LAR-IAC 1 participants.

You can see the file below:

PDF File – Pitchess Solar Analysis Result Map Series (April 27, 2009) – 20 Mb

April 27th, 2009 | Category: Case Studies, GIS Data | Leave a comment

This blog can be visualized on Google Earth!!  Download the eGIS Blog KML Network Link here and try it out.

Wordpress, the engine behind this site, as well as a pair of plugins that I have tested (WPGeo and GeoPress), are able to convert the normal RSS feed that allows subscription to this site to a GeoRSS, which attaches a location to each post.

I did some research online and found the GeoNames web service, which among other things converts an RSS feed to a KML feed.  For the GeoNames site and more information, click here.

I created a network link that uses the following syntax: http://ws.geonames.org/rssToGeoRSS?type=kml&feedUrl=http://gis.lacounty.gov/eGIS/?feed=rss2

You can replace our RSS feed with any other feed that you like – and you will see it on Google Earth.

Why am I excited about this?

This blog provides a flexible, powerful tool for content management, and notification.  It allows multiple people to imput and view information.  It can be integrated into multiple platforms (Facebook, Twitter, GIS sites like ArcExplorere, etc), with a single point of entry.

People interested in the topic can subscribe, author, and edit content, and have those changes automatically pushed out via RSS and GeoRSS.

Here is how I plan to test this first: The creation of a dedicated site for the maintenance of facility and service information across the County.  Each site in the County will have a dedicated blog page, categorized by the type (or types) of facility.  The person responsible for maintaining this information will be given a login and password that allows them to edit that facility.  They can upload and attach pictures, blueprints, emergency response plans, contact information (the information is basically limitless).  At that point, the system can take over and distribute to anyone who is interested and has the rights to view that information (since posts can be private as well as public).

People can subscribe to just the schools, or the parks, or a combination of the two.  If new information becomes available, a person can comment to note a change (and that comment stream can be subscribed to as well).

I look forward to seing where we go with this.

March 10th, 2009 | Category: Case Studies, GIS Data, Links, Technical, Technique | Leave a comment