Introducing MetroBoston DataCommon
- From:
- Spanring, Christian
- Date:
- 2010-06-25 @ 19:31
Hi,
We, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC, a regional planning
agency for the Greater Boston area) and The Boston Indicators Project, are
going to use GeoNode to upgrade our data portal MetroBoston DataCommon
(http://metrobostondatacommon.org). Our focus is clearly on thematic maps,
showing regional structures. We usually don't collect or create data, we
process and analyze data from different sources and are mostly in the role
of a data intermediary. We use data and maps to tell stories and raise
awareness about certain trends and developments in our region.
We decided to go with GeoNode because what we saw on the wireframes on
geonode.org overlapped a lot with our vision for upgrading our data
portal:
*) enable easy access to raw data
*) provide tools to explore and visualize data
*) engage users with data and leverage a regional data community through
"social functionality"
We really like the idea of Django wrapped around a data catalog and
mapping applications. It allows us to tap into the pool of re-usable
Django apps and add them to our core tasks - data and maps. At least
that's the long-term goal for us.
We don't have internal resources for GeoNode core development. What we're
going to do is to run GeoNode, develop custom templates and maybe tweak it
here and there a little. And we're trying to integrate another project
we're involved in as Django app, that we would like to plug into GeoNode.
This will be a data exploration tool - thematic maps, charts, histograms,
statistics through R, etc. - that is currently under development and will
be transitioned into an open source project later this year.
I guess we're representing here another user-side and will provide
feedback as we go implementing and working with GeoNode over the next
couple of months.
We're pretty excited about GeoNode, it will be a great fit for us!
Thanks to all of you for the great work you're doing here!
Christian
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