Chris Villar, who heads the LAMP (Liverpool Asset Management Programme) team at Liverpool City Council, and I presented GENIE to the MapInfo User Group conference in Bristol, UK last Thursday, January 21st.
Chris explained how his research team use Regression and Factor Analysis to reduce 32 social indicators – ranging from the bad stuff e.g. number of ASBOs, drug offences and abandoned vehicles, to the (hopefully) better stuff like affordability of house prices and proximity to schools – to a single score which encapsulates the ability of a geographic area to stay “healthy” and survive. This score is known as the Sustainability Index.
GENIE is an application which provides local planners and researches with access to their local Sustainability scores. It allows them to geographically map the Index and the underlying attributes thematically and look for areas with high/low scores. They can also perform what-if? simulations to see the effect of planned interventions on an area; for example what would happen if they were to reduce the level of fly-tippng by 50%? What if they reduced rents in social housing?
We’re currently running the latest Beta version on the Amazon Elastic Cloud but will be migrating it onto Liverpool’s servers in the coming month.
I usually start these presentations with an intro which tries to distinguish between Software tools and Applications. To start to emphasise how “apps” can spread the access to advanced modelling/analytics/insight to a broader community. “Democratising Analysis” if you like. However what becomes apparent to me whenever I dip into the GIS world is that there is a very natural marriage between GIS and advanced analytics and that numerous applications already exist within this area and, as a consequence of that, that GIS practitioners “get” apps more than most. To illustrate this there two other presentations on the day which covered apps that span geography and advanced data modelling; one on Flood Risk mapping/modelling by Nathan Muggeridge of Mouchel and one on Land Use modelling by Melanie Bosredon of the David Simmons Consultancy.
Of course that is not to say that there isn’t still a huge potential for applications which combine GIS and analytics, just as there is huge potential for such apps in analytics. I believe that we’re only really scratching the surface of both.