Metroview

By: Josh Kjenner

Metroview was developed to visualize data made available by the City of Edmonton in a way that enables citizens and decision-makers to better understand their city. The program uses a simple, functional interface to illustrate the social dimension not normally captured by otherwise basic spatial data.

Everyone from small business owners to newcomers to Edmonton to seasoned city planners will appreciate Metroview’s ability to meaningfully display important demographic data with a few quick clicks. Metroview uses a simple yet functional interface to maximize program utility and speed. Curated data lists ensure that the program remains accessible and provides clear value to all potential users, and the ability to export images created with Metroview to PDF ensures those data visualizations are readily available whenever they’re needed.

By making it extremely simple to view what was formerly columns of numbers in a beautiful, intuitive manner, Metroview contributes to a number of the City of Edmonton’s strategic priorities. As examples:

-Social agencies and city staff involved in implementing Edmonton’s ‘people plan’ The Way We Live, will benefit from easy access to information about the relative age and household income levels of Edmonton’s neighborhoods.

-Planners can use this program to better communicate their decisions by providing members of public and community leagues with the ability to become more informed by independently accessing understandable displays of information for a given development’s neighbourhood (The Way We Plan).

-Small business owners targeting specific segments of Edmonton’s population can use Metroview to facilitate strategic decision-making, making it much more likely that they and in turn the City will prosper over the long-term (The Way We Prosper).

Metroview will grow as more datasets become available through the City of Edmonton’s Open Data Initiative.

Metroview is an open source program and uses contributions from several other open source programs. The code contains several algorithms (for example, an algorithm that removes unnecessary and/or glitch data points from the KML data supplied by the city to optimize the graphical display of this data) that can be used by other developers looking to take advantage of the city’s datasets. Care was taken to make this application's code easily understandable and modifiable, and it is hoped that the beta version submitted for this competition will provide a solid foundation for future feature additions.

Comments