NACIS 2016

OpenStreetMap Analytics: Rewarding Contributors by Tracking OSM in Real-Time
Dylan Moriarty, Develpoment Seed
Marc Farra, Develpoment Seed
Nate Smith, Development Seed
Mapathons are an increasingly effective way to get data into OpenStreetMap. The Missing Maps project hosts mapathons to increase the amount of data in areas that don't have large local OSM communities. Using the OSM tasking manager and data from Missing Maps, the American Red Cross built an analytics platform that tracks user trends in real-time and rewards contributors for their efforts. This talk will explore the design challenges inherit in the scale of an OSM project, and how we handled developing an architecture that needs to reliably handle bursts of data during high periods of activity, yet reducing costs by auto scaling to input as required.

Taxis and APIs: Mapping and Analyzing Transportation in New York City
Juan Francisco Saldarriaga, Columbia University
David A. King, Arizona State University
Taxicabs are a critical aspect of the public transit system in New York City. The yellow cabs that are ubiquitous in Manhattan are as iconic as the city's subway system, and in recent years green taxicabs have been introduced by the city to improve taxi service. In this talk we will present two projects that map and analyze taxi data. The first one looks at cash versus credit card payments and analyzes their spatial distribution in relation to the unbanked population of the city. The second project attempts to quantify how much do green cabs have to travel empty before they can pickup another passenger, and maps their travels using multiple routing APIs. This project analyzes transportation policies while also reflecting upon the tools we use to perform our analysis; it is as much about the tools as about the content.
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Taking it Public: Visualizing Geospatial Data on the Web Using Shiny
Jerry Shannon, University of Georgia
Kyle Walker, Texas Christian University
Julia Connell, University of Georgia
Governmental and non-profit institutions have increasingly created data dashboards based on open datasets to increase transparency and encourage citizen participation. Two limitations have hampered these efforts. First, raw datasets are often complex and difficult to decipher for non-specialists. Second, software to visualize trends within the data is expensive. For several of these systems, tools specifically for geovisualization are underdeveloped. In this presentation, we describe how Shiny, a data visualization system developed by RStudio, provides solutions to both issues. Shiny harnesses a variety of existing tools such as Leaflet, Plotly, and Highcharts, and encourages users to interact and explore datasets.  As it runs on the free and open source R software, Shiny's cost is also minimal.  We use two case studies to describe how Shiny provides an accessible way to facilitate data exploration for public audiences.
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Where Do We Put It All? Lessons Learned Housing Large Geospatial Data Collections In OCUL's Scholars GeoPortal
Jo Ashley, OCUL Scholars Portal, University of Toronto Libraries
Amber Leahey, OCUL Scholars Portal, University of Toronto Libraries
The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) is a consortium of twenty-one university libraries in the province of Ontario, Canada that collaborates through collective purchasing and shared digital library infrastructure. OCUL's Scholars GeoPortal service (geo.scholarsportal.info) uses Esri software to provide a set of online tools for identifying, exploring, and downloading licensed geospatial datasets for academic research in Ontario. Since 2012, the usage and size of geospatial data collections housed and showcased in Scholars GeoPortal has grown significantly, with more than 220,000 site visits and over 140TB of data, resulting in a number of challenges. This session will introduce the GeoPortal's interface and discuss various data related issues and demands facing the current version of the geoportal, lessons learned, as well as future ideas and plans for continued success.
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Mapping Virtual Traffic in Real Space and Time - 10 Minute Talk
Ryan Mullins Aptima, Inc.
Caroline Ziemkiewicz, Aptima, Inc.
Adam Fouse, Aptima, Inc.
Computer networks are essential to modern communication. Understanding the logical and spatiotemporal connections of these networks is an essential requirement for those ensuring information availability, integrity, and confidentiality. Past network visualizations have, generally, focused on representing either their logical structure or physical location. Approaches to the former typically involve node-link diagrams, which offer utility for small networks but fail when scaled to the complexities of large modern networks. Approaches to the latter effectively communicate where networked assets are, but place significant cognitive load on the human figure out how and how quickly information will get there. In this presentation, we present a novel network visualization concept which combines approaches from traffic mapping and node-link diagrams to show the minimum time to communicate between network nodes. Additionally, we present some initial findings from a usability analysis that sheds some light on the important geographic attributes for network visualizations.
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