Hurricane Sandy

We have setup 3 instances:

• Hospitals Status Tracking.
• American Red Cross: Volunteer Management for Shelter Staffing
• OccupySandy managing Requests for Supplies & Volunteers

• Hurricane Hackers presentation

Location Data

Boundaries and hierarchy:

• L0, L1 & L2 are in GADM (done)
• L3
  • Tiger: ​http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/tgrshp2010.html
    • 1 L3 Borough in each L2 County
• L4
  • Brooklyn: ​http://geocommons.com/overlays/6090
  • Queens names: ​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Queens_neighborhoods
  • NY State civil boundaries: ​http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=927
    "boundaries of incorporated places in New York State (state, counties, cities, towns, villages, and Indian reservations)"
    (Note copyrighted.)
• Zipcodes -- polygons and parents
  • NYS
    • ​http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=934
    • needs parenting to L3s via ​http://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendix/neighborhoods.htm (done but this is only for NYC)
  • NJ
    • ​http://geocommons.com/overlays/22081
    • Could extract hierarchy from one of these:
      • ​http://www.brainyzip.com/state/zip_newjersey.html
      • ​http://newjersey.hometownlocator.com/zip-codes/counties.cfm
  • Important zipcode facts: ​http://www.maponics.com/products/gis-map-data/maps-reports/zip-code-maps/faqs/
    • Zipcodes can cross administrative region boundaries. They don't cross state boundaries, but do cross county boundaries. (For the population centers project, when we found a zipcode that spanned admin regions, we partitioned the zipcode -- made one location record for each partition. Names were qualified with the parent region.)
    • Zipcode regions are not technically polygons but rather groups of addresses.
    • USPS neither needs nor maintains boundary polygons.
    • Each zipcode is assigned by USPS to a city, but not by boundary inclusion -- rather, this is by which post office delivers mail to that zipcode. Thus lists of USPS-designated cities cannot be used for the location hierarchy.
    • Zipcodes have a prefix hierarchy.
      • ​http://stevemorse.org/jcal/zip.html
      • Three-digit zipcode prefixes by state: ​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZIP_code_prefixes
• Full hierarchy w/o shapefiles is available from ​http://www.zip-codes.com/zip-code-database.asp for US$40. They allow looking up data in batches here ​http://www.zip-codes.com/search.asp, but would need to copy & paste the table part of the page into a file (not the html, just select the rows in the rendered page). Caution: We do not want to use copyrighted or proprietary material w/o the requisite payment or attribution. Could contact them and inquire about temporary use of the information.

Notes on uploading from csv files (incomplete)

• Location hierarchy & wkt
  CLI process to import location CSVs:

  auth.override = True
  resource = s3db.resource("gis_location")
  stylesheet = os.path.join(request.folder, "static", "formats", "s3csv", "gis", "location.xsl")
  import_file = os.path.join("/", "home", "data", "US_L2.csv")
  File = open(import_file, "r")
  resource.import_xml(File, format="csv", stylesheet=stylesheet)
  db.commit()
  

  • wiki:UserGuidelinesGISData
  • wiki:GIS/OpenStreetMap#Import