Meet the team: Geographic Research
Do you wonder how you can look up your garbage pickup schedule via 311, emergency responders know the entrance of a building is on a side street despite the address being on an avenue, or you receive correspondences from the NYC Board of Elections that are specific to your district?
Let me introduce you to NYC Planning’s Geographic Research team, whose mission is to provide objective and high-quality data and expertise to keep the data in the Property Address Directory (PAD) and Citywide Street Centerline (CSCL) current and accurate through intensive investigative research. PAD and CSCL support a myriad of critical citywide operations and systems including 911, 311, and Geosupport. Geosupport is used by over 40 city agencies and provides geographic information about locations such as street addresses, intersections, and tax lots. Datasets including LION, which is the street centerline file, and dozens of Political and Administrative District Boundaries are extracted from the CSCL and made available to the public to support a multitude of data needs.
So, who are the people behind these critical NYC datasets? The Geographic Research team consists of 8 geographic researchers who are within NYC Planning’s IT department. These individuals have backgrounds in geography, urban planning, environmental science, and more, and they are all extremely skilled in GIS and knowledgeable of geospatial data. As a team, these GIS experts are responsible for adding and updating building addresses, street centerlines, and political and administrative boundaries on a daily basis.
To update these data, the team receives inputs from numerous entities, including Borough Presidents, Department of Buildings (DOB), Department of Finance, Board of Elections, Department of Sanitation, among others; these inputs may contain new organics pick-up schedules, new and demolished buildings, updated congressional district boundaries, new addresses and streets, and a myriad of other information. Additionally, feedback is received from the public. Public feedback generally centers around someone reporting that the results for a specific address are incorrect, such as an incorrect school district, latitude and longitude values, or tax lot number. The information received through these communication channels is then interpreted and verified by the geographic researchers, who then update PAD and/or CSCL accordingly to reflect the new information.
Geographic Research performs extensive research to validate any requested changes or reported errors before making updates to PAD or CSCL; they don’t take anybody’s word that something is true. Researchers use current and historic imagery, maps, and documents, as well as site plans, external data sources, and internet searches to conduct their research. After completing the research process, a geographic researcher will then either:
1) make a change to PAD and/or CSCL and inform the requester,
2) communicate to the requester that they cannot make the requested change and why, or
3) inform the requester that they cannot make the change as the requester exactly wants but they have devised a workaround to get to the desired outcome.
PAD is a tabular database. Edits are made by updating individual attributes via SQL queries or a custom GUI. CSCL is a relational geospatial database. Using GIS software Geographic Research team members add or modify street centerlines, or edit the attributes associated with a street segment. Concurrently, with the maintenance of centerlines, administrative polygons are maintained is such a way so that they remain aligned to centerlines, through enforcement of topological business rules. Through relational logic these individual street segments and coexistent polygons are the building blocks to produce LION and the other derived products.
Both PAD and CSCL are inputs into NYC’s Geocoding applications and the emergency response system. Therefore, it’s imperative that the data are kept up to date, accurate, and comprehensive. In addition to making data updates based on information received by external entities, the team devises special research projects to improve the quality of these datasets. Some of these research projects have involved reviewing all step streets to ensure they are captured and accurately represented, adding common place names for entities such as schools and libraries, and updating highway reference markers. These projects improve data precision, and subsequently people are successfully directed to the intended location. Furthermore, with each Census, the Geographic Research team works closely with NYC Planning’s Population team to ensure all addresses and units within a building are captured, to help the City and the Census Bureau count every New Yorker.
To ensure the seamless delivery of the data and software products derived from CSCL and PAD, Geographic Research is the coordinating body for routine and ad-hoc releases of the aforementioned data and software updates, ensuring that all participating teams are in sync and the data and software are complete, comprehensive, and of the highest quality. In addition to being researchers, Geographic Research team members are also quality assurance specialists. Before releasing derived data and software the team conducts an extensive quality assurance and control process to verify that new records are in the latest datasets, the software returns the expected results, and known edge cases are handled appropriately. Furthermore, the team’s passion for data quality extends beyond their immediate domain; the team collaborates with partner agencies, such as DOB and the Office of Technology and Information (OTI), to keep related datasets, like the Building Identification Numbers (BINs), in sync. This helps ensure that New Yorkers receive consistent information when engaging with different City agencies.
The nature of their work turns Geographic Research team members into NYC geography experts. They can describe the nuances of Queens addresses and make sense of their hyphenated house numbers, explain why residents of Edgewater Park in the Bronx use the neighborhood name instead of street names, and discuss how vanity addresses are created. Several team members have been with the team for over ten years and developed a wealth of institutional knowledge. Teams throughout NYC Planning, other government agencies, and the public rely on Geographic Research to solve problems and answer questions about this ever-changing city.
