Breaking Into Geocoding
Last week BDW’s Cohort 7.5 field-tripped to Copper Mountain to test out their exclusive Sherpa app — an app created to enhance a skier’s experience and engagement on the mountain. Everyone had a great time, but who can really complain about a free day of snowboarding and skiing? Overall, I think the app is extremely innovative and has great potential. It’s a testament to where things are going in the world — a push to bridge the physical and digital world.
Being inspired by the innovation of the Sherpa app, my fellow classmates and I began brainstorming other cool app ideas on our two hour car ride home. One person said she would love an app that would pull together a list of breweries in Boulder, CO and create customized tours that she and her friends could check out. Well, they say if you want to manifest something you need to say it out loud.
Flash forward to this past Monday. BDW had the pleasure of inviting Esri, a company specializing in geographic information systems, to come to our school and conduct a two-day workshop. Talk about amazing and cutting edge stuff. I could of spent a whole week learning about their software and it’s potential, but basically Esri is the leader in Geocoding technology. What is Geocoding? According to good ol’ Wikipedia:
“Geocoding (is the process of enriching a description of a location, most typically a postal address or place name, with geographic coordinates from spatial reference data such as building polygons, land parcels, street addresses, ZIP codes and so on. Geocoding facilitates spatial analysis using Geographic Information Systems and Enterprise Location Intelligence systems.”
And talk about coincidences — in order to illustrate the capabilities of Geocoding our teachers took us through an in class tutorial of how to create tours of Boulder, CO breweries as a potential new business. What?!!! I think my classmate is onto something.
So how did this work? Within the Esri database is a list of all Boulder, CO breweries and we visually placed them on a map. From there we were able to use their tapestry data to locate the breweries within a particular demographic. After narrowing down the list, we were then able to create a radius filter which would further scale down the breweries to the ones our customer could get to within a certain time frame. And voilà! Our tour was created. Not only was it easy to do, but we were able to use the online web tools to customize the look of our maps. Some of the best looking digital maps I’ve seen and there was no coding involved.
Later we split up into groups and created prototypes for new app ideas. Each group came up with original and out-of-the-box ideas, reaffirming I made the right the decision to come to BDW because awesome stuff is happening here.
All in all, the Esri workshop opened my eyes to a world of new information. Being able to visualize and analyze big data in a way that reveals patterns, trends, and relationships is very exciting. I’m curious to see how having access to this information will influence my own ideas and decision making. Like they say, knowledge is power.
I am currently a student in BDW’s 50 week program. Learn more about the BDW program. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter.
