|
|
By markgreninger, on May 1st, 2013  ESRI has published a how-to guide on building web maps showing Sheriff Crime data with ArcGIS Online: read the post here
The reason this post hit me was not so much for the fact that it uses LA County data, which is great, or the fact that our Sheriff department shares this data (which is even better – kudos to Wendy Harn!!!) – but that it shows the value of making our data open, updated, and easy to find! This increases access to developers, who can make the data more visible to citizens, improving their understanding about what goes on around them, and potentially improving their lives.
What sparked this “epiphany” was this little banner on the top:
As of April 30th (8 days after the post):
- 52 people had shared this on Facebook (this goes into their timeline)
- 120 people had shared this on Twitter
- 200 people had shared this via Tumblr.
- 372 total shares.
Well – 372 folks doesn’t seem like much, until you realize that means that this has been shared with ALL of their friends and followers – so we may be talking about thousands of other people. Each one of them can backtrack to both the ESRI post, as well as the LA County GIS Data Portal. So they may end up using the instructions to create their own maps and applications, learning both about GIS, crime, and analysis, but maybe finding other data that they have interest in, and can work with.
Maybe one of them will build an application like crimemapping.com that does some neat analysis (supported by the Sheriff and other police departments), combined with other data that we have, to do some neat work.
By markgreninger, on June 26th, 2012 This video is GREAT! New we know how maps were made before computers (amazing isn’t it?)
Thanks Joel for passing along. GIS maintenance is not a new thing …
Click here to see the video.
`Thanks to smartphones and GPS, maps are just one more thing we tend to take for granted in our digital era.
Caught Mapping, produced by Chevrolet in 1940, explores how roadmaps were made at the time. Courtesy of the Prelinger Archive, the educational film outlines the whole process, from the field men who do the research to the cartographers who update the maps, featuring strategically placed Chevrolet cars all along the way.`
By markgreninger, on May 8th, 2012  LA City Planning GIS Data PAge The City of Los Angeles Planning department has launched a GIS Data Portal for downloading various GIS data files pertaining to City Planning information.
You can access the data by going to http://planning.lacity.org, selecting the Maps and Stats button on the left, then selecting the LADCP GIS Data. page.
I will also add this link to our LA County GIS Data Portal, (http://gis.lacounty.gov/dataportal), which contains links to County and other data like this.
While I like the portal itself, there are some things I think that LA City should look into:
- It’s not integrated into any of the other GIS data from LA City, meaning that it’s focus on Planning only means that I still need to go to many other sites to get other GIS data from LA City.
- The layer names are images, which means that if Google or Microsoft crawl their site, it will be a lot harder to get this data on the search results.
- I did notice that the page doesn’t have its own URL which also will cause issues for search engines to make it easier to find.
By markgreninger, on December 21st, 2011  Open Data License This has been in the back of my mind for a while, so I thought I’d get opinions on what we should do with the GIS data that we create and share. What I am trying to avoid is a reseller packaging and re-selling our GIS data without:
- Adding value, and
- Giving credit back (attribution).
At the recent Geocoding conference, I had a discussion with an expert, who pointed me to the Open Data Commons licenses. I just took a look, and they have three flavors: So – we’ll get there soon enough, but if you have an opinion as to how we should license our data, let me know!
By markgreninger, on November 7th, 2011 ZIP codes are a rather important layer to maintain. LA County has developed a parcel specific ZIP code layer that can be accessed here: http://egis3.lacounty.gov/dataportal/index.php/2011/01/24/zip-codes-with-parcel-specific-boundaries/
With the recent changes to our supervisorial district boundaries, GIS is being leveraged to update a ZIP code to Supervisorial District Boundary correlation table. It’s turning out to be quite a job for the Registrar/Recorder since ZIP codes are not maintained geographically by the US Postal Service, but we do our best.
And here comes another wrinkle … 
Continue reading Diamond Bar residents to vote on ZIP code change
By markgreninger, on October 11th, 2011 The County began maintaining its own GIS address data back in 2000. In its current iteration, the system to maintain it, the Countywide Address Management System (CAMS). has managed to achieve very good accuracy rates of over 99% of source data, but as the article forwarded to me from Glendale shows, I am thinking that the next phase of this effort has to formalize the integration with public safety resources.
By markgreninger, on September 28th, 2011  2011 District Boundaries Please note that this boundary is not yet effective – this is for reference and planning purposes only until it takes effect on October 27th, 2011.
The Board of Supervisors adopted a set of new Supervisorial Districts yesterday (September 27, 2011). I have loaded this data into the eGIS Repository, and added a link to the data as well as made the shapefile(s) available for download in the LA County GIS Data Portal.
Click here to go get the data.
The process to create the districts was a long and interesting one, and the LA County redistricting website: http://redistricting.lacounty.gov/ will give you more information than you would ever need.
Note that there may be challenges to these boundaries in court, but they are the officially adopted boundaries (at this time).
By markgreninger, on July 20th, 2011  Snapshot of the Data Map UPDATE: Thanks to Vijay from DHS – he was able to reduce the size to 14 Mb.
I showed this poster yesterday at our eGIS Meeting, and wanted to pass along. I think it shows in a very intuitive way the focus for our Countywide Enterprise GIS. There are currently three columns – the first one showing the data theme areas, the second one showing how these themes are organized in our Enterprise GIS Repository, and the third one showing the web services that convert data into services that can be re-used. What’s missing are the programs that oversee the management of these data themes, the access to them through the GIS Data Portal (http://gis.lacounty.gov/dataportal), and a final column showing the applications that have been built from those services and themes.
We’ll get to those as soon as we can
It’s a massive file since it was designed as a poster, and has a lot of high resolution imagery in the background, so be careful:
Download the eGIS Data Map for LA County: eGIS Data Map for LA County.pdf (14 Mb)
By markgreninger, on June 10th, 2011 NAIP 2010 aerial imagery services (web mapping services) are now offered by the California Department of Fish and Game (DFG). The services are public and can be used to easily view the statewide USDA NAIP 2010 1-meter resolution imagery that was flown last summer.
Continue reading NAIP 2010 aerial imagery services
By markgreninger, on June 2nd, 2011 There are a couple of different verdicts on this, but where Santa Clara used a security argument and lost, Orange County used a “GIS is a system” argument and won.
It’s a dilemma in general – how do governments recoup the costs for the maintenance of valuable data like parcels. Do we charge for them, create a fee on development or permits to support this, or make them freely available and note that better access to information will drive economic activity and reduce costs?
In LA, the fact that the parcel database is extremely low cost has helped reduce the duplication of effort, creating a standard mapping base that will improve coordination and development among governments, and is streamlining our emergency response.
See the article below:
Continue reading Orange County Parcel Database Exempt from Public Records Act
|
|
ESRI has published a how-to guide on building web maps showing Sheriff Crime data with ArcGIS Online: read the post here
