For my third Rails app at the Flatiron School I teamed up with Bana and we set-out to learn some different geo tools and to also use one of the datasets off of NYC’s Open Data portal.
The NYC Open Data portal is powered by Socrata, a data technology firm out of Seattle. NYC Open Data makes the wealth of public data generated by various New York City agencies and other City organizations available for public use. The platform provides access to hundreds of datasets and comes equipt with an array of tools to make working this data easier and more accessible to wider range of technical levels.
We came across a post on the NYC ITT Tumblr about a Data Kind DataDive in which they explored NYC Open Data. One of the highlighted datasets was the tree census datasets, including info on every street tree in the five boroughs of NYC. This rich data set seemed like a excellent opportunity to explore geo tools as well as NYC’s urban forest.
Tools
The Geocoder Gem proved to be a simple and effective solution to geocoding addresses. Our app includes some simple functionality to add a tree to the dataset by either A. collecting location information from a mobile device or computer, or B. by geocoding an address. There was also a great Railscast that helped us get started.
We used CartoDB to map the datasets. CartoDB handled the large number of data points with ease and created beautiful maps in no time. It easily geocoded all of the addresses, though we did run into limitations regarding the number of points the free plan would support.
Open Data NYC is part of an initiative to improve the accessibility, transparency, and accountability of City government. The tree census data had already been used to explore how the City’s tree species composition changed over time, to predict where our urban forest will be most vulnerable to storms, and if programmatic maintenance reduced future citizen requests in an area such as tree pruning.
Next Steps:
We hope to finish up the front-end work next week after the madness of our Flatiron School experience is done and deploy to Heroku. This is an app that really needs a mobile companion. Perhaps if I’ll try my luck with Ruby Motion over the holidays.
