GIS - The Greater Extent: Shifting Boundaries between Consumer and Professional Geospatial Applications

About a year ago, Amber Bieg, a former teacher and self-taught GIS analyst working for Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF—a private nonprofit agency that plants and cares for trees in San Francisco), asked the City Council for funds to combine her organization's tree database with the city's and create a Web interface that would allow community members to search for and input data on individual trees. The Council turned her down, but Autodesk, which was looking for ways of testing and promoting MapGuide, its open source GIS platform, enthusiastically took up the project and paid an external consultant to code the new tree mapping application. Then the City's Bureau of Urban Forestry (BUF), which is responsible for maintaining tree permits, began to use it, too.

"We have been using the application for our own planning purposes," says Kris Opbroek, a project manager for the city's Department of Public Works (DPW). "So, this is really a collaborative project between a government agency, a nonprofit, and a public company," says Charlie Crocker, Senior Product Manager, Geospatial, at Autodesk. Bieg now looks forward to discussing this model with colleagues in other cities in the United States and abroad.

When she decided to develop a mapping system for FUF, Bieg visited BUF and found that "their database was in worse shape than ours," she told me. To find a more effective way for her organization and the city to share tree data, she reviewed various proprietary GIS products but was unable to find one that her organization could afford. "I looked into Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps and ways to integrate Web-based mapping systems into our database," she says.

While the City Council declined to fund her proposal, Greg Braswell, at DPW, passed it on to Autodesk. "They loved it," she says. It took Autodesk a couple of months to code the application, says Crocker, but the biggest effort was to reconcile the data sources. "DPW has databases and paper maps and FUF did as well. They now have a single, consolidated data source and it is running this application."

Bieg envisioned the project to serve as an asset management tool for FUF and BUF, promote community support for trees, and enable a systematic cost-benefit analysis of their impact on neighborhoods. She developed the specs and the schema for the application. She envisioned it to be open source and flexible, so that other communities could take it and implement it in ways that met their urban forestry needs.

Autodesk built the application on a hybrid platform, incorporating MapGuide Open Source and open source Feature Data Object data access technology, as well as Autodesk MapGuide Studio. The database schema integrates the tree attribute data sets previously maintained separately by BUF and FUF, as well as real-time updates to spatial data made by BUF and FUF staff. The system stores tree attributes and locations in a Microsoft SQL Server database. Urban forest spatial data and inventory details are combined with the City and County of San Francisco's base map data for streets, land parcels, and more, to create an interactive, Web-based map. Point locations are mapped directly from the database using MapGuide Open Source, thereby removing the need for duplicate data sets and facilitating data maintenance. The rest of the land base map layers are stored as SDF.

Autodesk programmed business rules and logic using ASP. NET C# to define and control application activity according to user and user role, as well as to track edit history. The general public can search and view tree data according to various criteria— such as address, intersection, species, and age—and can also zoom, pan, and toggle map views, as well as add trees with such relevant information as address, photos, comments, and contact information. Authorized users may also edit and update tree-related data.

Over time, community involvement will improve the database, as thousands of people add data, make corrections, post comments, and upload photos. Trees entered into the database by community members immediately appear on the map, but are color-coded differently from those already on it. FUF or BUF staff then review the data and, once they approve a tree, they change the color of its marker on the map to indicate whether it is the responsibility of FUF or BUF. Bieg finds the community aspect of the system particularly interesting because her organization relies on thousands of volunteers to plant trees.

The urban forestry application code, Crocker points out, was built on top of the MapGuide platform, which anybody can download. "Very soon we are going to be submitting to OSGeo the actual application code as well," says Crocker. "So other communities will be able to download both the free, open source platform and the free, open source application and start adding to it."

STRATUM, a cost-benefit analysis tool developed at the USDA Forest Service Center for Urban Forest Research at the University of California, Davis, weighs such variables as how well trees prevent run-off, how they affect property values in a neighborhood, and how much carbon they absorb to allow users to quantify their value to a community. "One of our goals was to be able to run these sorts of cost-benefit analyses to help promote and get additional dollars to support the growth and extension of the urban forest," says Crocker. For this reason, Bieg says, "we made sure that the data schema fit with the fields that exist in STRATUM or that are required for it."

In the future, FUF staff will use the application "as our daily asset management tool," says Bieg. "Right now, the entire system is address-based. We plan to do an on-the-ground survey and this will give us all the coordinate points for every single tree."

Bieg credits Autodesk with playing "a critical role" in this project. "They provided the technical support and hired the developer that built the project. In addition, they have also been shepherding along the PR. We are looking at possibly talking with folks in China, L.A., and Denver, to see whether they are interested in using this."

"Autodesk has been working with DPW for many years," says Crocker. "They use many different pieces of our software, Mapguide just being one of them. This project is a big deal for Autodesk because we are very focused on sustainability and green design and for the City of San Francisco because Gavin Newsom, the mayor, has many green city initiatives. For us it is a way to showcase the technology and the fact that we are focusing, as a company, on sustainable design and green initiatives.

A longer version of this article appeared in the April 26 issue of GIS Monitor (www.gismonitor.com).

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