Enriching with External GIS Services

Joe Chop
Joe Chop
Sep 5, 2018 · 3 min read

One of the most useful features of StatEngine is the ability to enrich incident data. In data processing applications, enriching is a term to describe adding, enhance, or refining raw data. In our case, the raw data is incident data that comes from the CAD/RMS systems. Oftentimes, the raw data we receive is sparse. For example, the raw data generally just contains an address with latitude/longitude, but no information outside of the CAD/RMS system. Enriching can do — well pretty much anything from adding weather, traffic, or census data, correcting/populating fire response zones, geocoding addresses, looking up council district, or in our most recent enrichment — utilizing a local GIS server to populate neighborhood data.

“While many cities are defined by their skylines, Boston is distinguished by its proud, vibrant neighborhoods” (https://www.boston.gov/neighborhoods). The neighborhoods of Boston, however are not just important to their citizens, but also to the Boston Fire Department. The Boston Fire Department recently requested a historic analysis of incidents on a neighborhood basis. This sort of analysis is often required when performing station location analysis, budget justifications, updating standards of cover or providing background data for grant requests.

The StatEngine team hopped on the case, and was able to quickly develop an enrichment to populate neighborhood data. StatEngine generally leverages publicly available web services, such a the Boston Neighborhood WebService

With the custom module enabled, and the enrichment live….. let’s check out some of the new things we analyze.

Filtering down to just the incidents in the South Boston Neighborhood.

Global Filter By Neighborhodd

Identifying Trends By Neighborhood

Hmm — I guess those Islands take a little longer to get out to!

Event Durations Per Neighborhood

Analyzing how first due station calls are distributed in a neighborhood

Incidents by Neighborhood and First Due

Doubling up — combining parcel data with a neighborhood.

Now, with just one click, we can easily filter down to all calls to Residential 1-family homes in Dorchester.

Incidents by Parcel Use and Neighborhood

Next Steps

Boston Neighborhood data is just one example of a StatEngine enrichment. We are already integrating with census services, weather APIs, and always interested in extending the platform more. If you have an enrichment in mind and have a GIS service, shapefile, GeoJSON, or just plain-old CSV, — chances are we can integrate with it.

Got an enrichment in mind?

— email us at contact@statengine.io

Joe Chop

Written by

Joe Chop

statengine

Accelerating data analytics for public safety.

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