GNOCDC – Using WeoGeo to Share Data

After Hurricane Katrina hit, the focus of New Orleans became recovery.  The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC) has been working hard at identifying where people are returning to their neighborhoods by using direct mail marketing or Junk Mail.  The GNOCDC.org website is the most widely used source of data about New Orleans’ neighborhoods and surrounding parishes.  They’ve been able to show the population recovery of New Orleans over the past 4 years on their population recovery website.  What has been really good about this website is that it has freed them to do what they are good at, democratizing data.  Using hosted web services such as Google Maps and Amazon Web Services keeps them from being IT or web administrators of their web products.  They just author the data on their desktops and publish to the hosted SaaS sites and know that their uses will be able to get the data when they need it.

This has worked really well for them and has weathered following hurricanes (and the web traffic it brings) such as Hurricane Gustov.  Traffic spikes from natural disasters can really punish web services and non-profit organizations can have a really hard time planning for them.  So while they want to make sure they can be as responsive at possible, they still have to work inside their limited budgets.  This is where WeoGeo comes in.

The GNOCDC is currently migrating their data storage from their hard drives on their desktop and laptop computers into the WeoGeo Library.  They are using the new WeoGeo ArcGIS Desktop Toolbar (still in private beta) to take their data and get it stored in a safe, secure environment that they can access anywhere in the world.  One of the hardest things for them to do is work while evacuating during a hurricane.  Now they’ll be able to access their datasets on any computer in any state at any time.  This allows them to think of what products they’ll need to provide to news organizations, other non-profits and even first responders without worrying if their hard drives will survive the storms.

But they aren’t stopping there.  By taking other SaaS services and the WeoGeo RESTful APIs, they are able to extend WeoGeo in many more directions.  One great service that GNOCDC provides their community is Ask Allison.  This is where people can directly ask GNOCDC staff questions directly and then get a custom response crafted explicitly for them.  Currently GNOCDC is migrating this service to Salesforce.com so that their CRM database is in a hosted service and they don’t have to maintain it themselves.  So a request comes in to the Ask Allison Salesforce.com app and then gets directed to the staff member who can best answer it.  WeoGeo comes into the equation when there is a data product involved.  GNOCDC staff will create the data product using whatever tools they need (ArcGIS Desktop, Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Excel, etc) and then upload it to the WeoGeo Library.  The Salesforce.com app will see this dataset available for a user that requested it at Ask Allison and alert them to download it.  When the user goes to WeoGeo and successfully downloads it, the WeoGeo Library will tell Salesforce.com that the dataset was downloaded and GNOCDC can then follow-up with them if they wish.

Because WeoGeo Library also tracks genealogy of datasets, when products get updated, they’ll be able to use Salesforce.com to determine if an email needs to be sent out to some users seeing if they want updates.  This will give them the ability to serve their users better by helping them stay focused on producing the products and letting tools such as Salesforce.com and WeoGeo manage their users and data.  Another great feature of using WeoGeo to share datasets is that we use FME to allow transforming datasets into whatever formats the end users need.  FME on the backend of WeoGeo Library (and WeoGeo Market) allows GNOCDC to create their products using the tools they prefer and let WeoGeo worry about converting them into other formats.  In fact GNOCDC can post data as shapefiles and let their users download them as KML or PDF without GNOCDC having to do the conversion themselves. It also keeps their data storage needs much smaller, rather than keeping different formats of the same dataset (shp, dwg, pdf, kml, georss) they store their native format and let WeoGeo handle the transformations (clip, file type conversion,etc).

For GNOCDC, using WeoGeo is about giving them the freedom to do their jobs without trying to figure out how to support their users IT infrastructure demands.  They don’t worry about technology changes, new format support, scalability or data backups.  It is all handled for them and in a manner that doesn’t change their workflows or their authoring software choices (ESRI ArcMap, Adobe Illustrator and Microsoft Excel).  It allows them to embrace the future without worries.

To see more about what GNOCD and WeoGeo are doing together, watch Denice Ross and James Fee at a talk they gave at Where 2.0 2009.  The presentation is below:

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