events

News or review of an event, like a conference or workshop

Census Workshop Recap

I’ve been swamped these past few months, revising my census book, teaching a spatial database course, and keeping the GIS Lab running. Thus, this will be a shorter post!

Last week I taught a workshop on understanding, finding, and accessing US Census Data at the Metropolitan Library Council of New York. If you couldn’t make it, here are the presentation slides and the group exercise questions.

Most of the participants were librarians who were interested in learning how to help patrons find and understand census data, but there were also some data analysts in the crowd. We began with an overview of how the census is structured by dataset, geography, and subject categories. I always cover the differences between the decennial census and the ACS, with a focus on how to interpret ACS estimates and gauge their reliability.

For workshops I think it’s best to start with searching for profiles (lots of different data for one place). This gives new users a good overview of the breadth and depth of the types of variables that are available in the census. Since this was a New York City-centric crowd we looked at the City’s excellent NYC Population Factfinder first. The participants formed small groups and searched through the application to answer a series of fact-finding questions that I typically receive. Beyond familiarizing themselves with the applications and data, the exercises also helped to spark additional questions about how the census is structured and organized.

Then we switched over to the Missouri Census Data Center’s profile and trends applications (listed on the right hand side of their homepage) to look up data for other parts of the country, and in doing so we were able to discuss the different census geographies that are available for different places. Everyone appreciated the simple and easy to use interface and the accessible tables and graphics. The MCDC doesn’t have a map-based search, so I did a brief demo of TIGERweb for viewing census geography across the country.

Once everyone had this basic exposure, we hopped into the American Factfinder to search for comparison tables (a few pieces of data for many places). We discussed how census data is structured in tables and what the difference between the profile, summary, and detailed tables are. We used the advanced search and I introduced my tried and true method of filtering by dataset, geography, and topic to find what we need. I mentioned the Census Reporter as good place to go for ACS documentation, and as an alternate source of data. Part of my theme was that there are many tools that are suitable for different needs and skill levels, and you can pick your favorite or determine what’s suitable for a particular purpose.

We took a follow-the-leader approach for the AFF, where I stepped through the website and the process for downloading two tables and importing them into a spreadsheet, high-lighting gotchas along the way. We did some basic formulas for aggregating ACS estimates to create new margins of error, and a VLOOKUP for tying data from two tables together.

We wrapped up the morning with a foreshadowing of what’s to come with the new data.census.gov (which will replace the AFF) and the 2020 census. While there’s still much uncertainty around the citizenship question and fears of an under count, the structure of the dataset won’t be too different from 2010 and the timeline for release should be similar.

foss4g boston 2017 logo

FOSS4G 2017 Round Up

A month ago at this time I was in Boston for FOSS4G 2017 (Free and Open Source for Geospatial), which is the international conference for free and open source GIS enthusiasts, developers, educators, and practitioners. I updated my introductory GIS / QGIS workshop manual to 2.18 Las Palmas (which is slated to be the next long term service release once 3.0 comes out) and Anastasia, Janine, and I took the workshop on the road. We had a good turnout and an excellent class, and then were able to enjoy the three days of sessions. Here are some of the high-lights from sessions I attended.

  • The NYC Department of City Planning has hired their own, internal open source developer and is assembling a team called NYC Planing Labs. Their first project was to revamp the city facilities database and build the NYC Facilities Explorer, a web mapping interface that sits on top of the database and makes it easy for folks to browse and visualize.
  • There was an interesting talk from an independent research unit that’s affiliated with the University of Chicago. The speaker outlined their process for switching their team from ESRI to open source. The talk gave me appreciation for the amount of work that’s involved for transitioning a team of service providers from one set of tools to another. This group did things the right way, doing necessary background research and identifying short, medium, and long term plans for making the switch. Their biggest revelation was that they ended up shifting funds from purchasing licenses to staff, which has allowed them to expand their activities.
  • PostGIS 2.4 will add a number of functions that were only available for the geometry type, like ST_Centroid, to the geography type. PostgreSQL 10 is going to allow users with big databases to take greater advantage of parallel computing.
  • Some archaeologists are looking to adapt the schema used by Open Street Map to create an OpenHistoryMap. There aren’t many global standards for cataloging archaeological data; it’s primarily site and project specific. Unique challenges include the importance of scale (need to see that pot shard in a room, in a house, in the overall site, in the greater region…) and varying degrees of reliability. Once an artifact is found there isn’t absolute certainty regarding it’s age, provenance, or use. This project (Open History Map) is different from Open Historical Map; the latter relies on data that’s already in OSM and describes the past as a function of the present.
  • I tend to use GRASS GIS in limited circumstances, but am always pleasantly surprised when I follow up to see what’s new. The big selling points are stability, backwards compatibility, and the ability to do a lot via the command line. For version 7.2 there are several improvements: an improved GUI, a data catalog, a more sophisticated Python editor, easier vector legend tools, an advanced search feature for finding modules, and temporal algebra. I’m not a heavy raster user and never work in 3D, but these have always been and continue to be major strengths of GRASS. They also have a growing repository of 3rd party plugins and modules.
  • One of the plenary speakers gave us a demo of R markdown for creating websites, documents, and even for writing books. It gives you the ability to easily import data and write R code to produce a chart, graph, or map right in the same document as your narrative text. So instead of doing a basic analysis, creating a chart, and writing up your project in three different places you can do it all in one place and compile it to HTML or PDF. With the source, readers also have the benefit of seeing what you did and they can test the results.
  • R has really come a long way for geospatial analysis and visualization. I can’t remember it even being mentioned at the last FOSS4G I attended in 2011, but in 2017 it was a major component of the conference. In trying to figure how it fits in to the landscape, I assumed that it was a matter of background and preference. People who have a stats background and want to do geospatial work are going to gravitate towards it, while people with more of a programming or data processing background may be more disposed to using Python or Javascript. The plenary speaker framed R as an exploratory language that’s great for iterative work – let me quickly graph this data to see what it looks like, then I’ll write another piece to view it a different way. Other scripting languages tend to tackle more tasks in one large batch in a linear fashion.
  • The contingent of academic GIS and geospatial librarians and developers has been growing at this conference over the years. There was an opportunity for the Open Geoportal and Geoblacklight communities to get together and exchange notes. Both groups have a commitment to open metadata standards and resource sharing.
  • OSGeo folks have been active in promoting free and open source GIS education, and have created a directory of GIS labs around the world.
  • Just when you thought you were confused about which tool to use, here’s another one – Vega, a declarative JSON grammar for creating graphs and charts.
  • QGIS 3.0 is on the horizon; it will encompass a shift from Qt 4 to 5 and Python 2 to 3. There are a number of great new features: a task manager, a data source manager to replace the dozen individual buttons in 2.x, better support for metadata viewing and editing, more 3D tools, multiple map canvases, the ability to store different user profiles (to save your plugins and layouts on shared machines), better digitizing tools, and a whole lot more. A lot of plugins will disappear as they make their way into the processing toolbox, the stand-alone QGIS Browser will be dropped as its functions are integrated into QGIS Desktop, and map projects created in 3.x will not be backward compatible to 2.x. The time line says that 3.0 will be launched in late Nov 2017, and at that point 2.18 will become the LTS release. It will take another year, til Nov 2018, when 3.2 becomes the LTS. If you’re like me and favor stability over new features, you can stick with 2.x for the another year.
  • A good talk on community health mapping introduced a stack that you can use for data gathering (Fulcrum), analysis (QGIS) and publishing on the web (Carto). I’m well versed in the last two, but didn’t know about Fulcrum. Essentially it’s an app that you can use on phones and tablets to gather data out in the field, including GPS coordinates. On his blog he’s created a series of lab exercises that cover the entire stack, so the communities can learn the process and take ownership of it and the tools.

Planning for FOSS4G 2018 is well underway. The conference uses a three year rotation where it goes from Europe to North America to another continent. Next year it’s Africa’s turn as the conference heads to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

Notes from the Open Geoportal National Summit

This past weekend I had the privilege of attending the Open Geoportal (OGP) National Summit in Boston, hosted by Tufts University and funded by the Sloan Foundation. The Open Geoportal (OGP) is a map-based search engine that allows users to discover and retrieve geospatial data from many repositories. The OGP serves as the front-end of a three-tiered system that includes a spatial database (like PostGIS) at the back and some middleware (Like OpenLayers) to communicate between the two.

Users navigate via a web map (Google by default but you can choose other options), and as they change the extent by panning or zooming a list of available spatial layers appears in a table of contents beside the map. Hovering over a layer in the contents reveals a bounding box that indicates its spatial extent. Several algorithms determine the ranking order of the results based on the spatial intersection of bounding boxes with the current map view. For instance, layers that are completely contained in the map view have priority over those that aren’t, and layers that have their geographic center in the view are also pushed higher in the results. Non-spatial search filters for date, data type, institution, and keywords help narrow down a search. Of course, the quality of the results is completely dependent on the underlying metadata for the layers, which is stored in the various repositories.

opengeoport_tufts

The project was pioneered by Tufts, Harvard, and MIT , and now about a dozen other large research universities are actively working with it, and others are starting to experiment. The purpose of the summit was to begin creating a cohesive community to manage and govern the project, and to increase and outline the possibilities for collaborating across institutions. At the back end, librarians and metadata experts are loading layers and metadata into their repositories; metadata creation is an exacting and time-consuming process, but the OGP will allow institutions to share their metadata records in the hope of avoiding duplicated effort. The OGP also allows for the export of detailed spatial metadata from FGDC and ISO to MODS and MARC, so that records for the spatial layers can be exported to other content management systems and library catalogs.

The summit gave metadata experts the opportunity to discuss best practices for metadata creation and maintenance, in the hopes of providing a consistent pool of records that can be shared; it also gave software developers the chance to lay out their road map for how they’ll function as an open source project (the OGP community could look towards the GeoNetwork opensource project, a forerunner in spatial metadata and search that’s used in Europe and by many international organizations). Series of five-minute talks called Ignite sessions gave librarians and developers the ability to share the work they were doing at their institutions, either with OGP in particular or with metadata and spatial search in general, which sparked further discussion.

The outcome of all the governance, resource sharing, and best practices discussions are available on a series of pages dedicated to the summit, on the opengeoportal.org project website. You can also experiment with the OGP via http://geodata.tufts.edu/, Tuft’s gateway to their repository. As you search for data you can identify which repository the data is coming from (Tufts, Harvard, or MIT) based on the little icon that appears beside each layer name. Public datasets (like US census layers) can be downloaded by anyone, while copyrighted sets that the schools’ purchased for their users require authentication.

OGP is a great open source project that operates under OGC standards and is awesome for spatial search, but the real gem here is the community of people that are forming around it. I was blown away by the level of expertise, dedication, and over all professionalism that each of the librarians, information specialists, and software developers exuded, via the discussions and particularly by the examples of the work they were doing at their institutions. Beyond just creating software, this project is poised to enhance the quality and compatibility of spatial metadata to keep our growing pile of geospatial stuff find-able.