For the past week Caroline and I have been spending most of our time and energy trying to make sure the parcel data is as clean and compact as possible. This has involved removing duplicate parcels, removing parcel overlap, deleting attributes we don’t need, and adding attributes we do need. Attributes we have added include temperature, waterbody and riparian buffer information, percent impervious surface, and percent urban tree cover. This data is being used for the Planting Prioritization application.
Sanat has been focusing on the Planting Prioritization application, which assigns a priority level to every parcel based on criteria selected by the user. Unlike previous interactive visualizations, we use PHP to get processed data from a MySQL database. The application home screen shows the entire city of Atlanta broken down by Neighborhood Planning Unit (NPU). Once the user selects an NPU, the screen shows a zoomed in map of the parcels within that NPU. By hovering over a parcel, the user can find out information about that parcel such as address and percent impervious surface. The sliders allow the user to choose what factors are important to them when selecting a planting site. By changing the weights of each factor, the calculated priorities are updated and result in a change of each parcel’s color.
Earlier this afternoon, we met with Alex Beasley of Trees Atlanta to learn what he thought of the application. We were happy to learn that he was excited about its functionality and also had a few suggestions. The main issue he had was clarity. He was a little confused by the sliders, and what they represented, so we will be working on making that more clear for the user.
We decided the forested land application should have attributes including temperature, percent UTC, acreage, and cost for every contiguous tract of land. This way, the user can dynamically select their own criteria in the application. I have been working on combining all of this data into one aggregate file so it is easy to use and to understand.
We hope to have most of this wrapped up by the end of the week so we can shift some of our focus to the final presentation.