MapBrief™

A cornerstone of the Lean Startup movement is the idea of a Minimally Viable Product (MVP) whereby a company, instead of spending months (and months) building the perfect product, quickly builds something that has just enough features to be useful, but makes no claims to completeness or finished polish. Instead, getting real feedback early from users interacting with an actual product, one can apply iterative improvements based on user behaviors rather than a bunch of people in a conference room white-boarding theoretical features that would be theoretically cool.

Minimally Viable Products are a bulwark against counterproductive perfectionism and the tendency to keep adding marginally useful features.  As we’ve seen in the Why Map Portals Don’t Work series, web map interfaces tend to be bloated with all manner of content and functionality that distract and hinder the user from carrying out their primary intention of information retrieval.

Below, then, I’ve created a Minimally Viable Property Lookup Service using a half million property records from the great City of Philadelphia. The goal is to create something that a) doesn’t require “Help”  b) enables the user to find information fast c) gives users links to more information and d) requires a minimal investment in tech infrastructure.

Cutting-edge info aesthetics? Um, no.

Without further ado…

Award-winning? No.

Soon-to-be profiled in a glossy industry magazine? Probably not.

Could you find an address quickly?  Probably.

Ingredients

Here’s a rundown of the minimalist ingredients powering the app.

• SQLite:  the 500K parcels are stored in a SQLite database.  SQLite has a number of important qualities including 1) ubiquitous, especially on cheap web hosting environments such as GoDaddy and InmotionHosting;  2) portable–it’s a single file so you can create and test locally and easily upload to the web; 3) it’s reasonably fast.
• Address Lookup:  this is the most important part of the app. You can’t have the users guessing about address formats, street types, etc.–let them just start typing and give them very specific feedback as to what options actually reside in your database.  They’ll figure it out.  Our address lookup is rather forgiving insofar as it takes fragments of house numbers and street names–again powered by a basic PHP script searching the address field in SQLite and piping the results into a javascript autocomplete widget. Even though our app is on generic shared web hosting, we’re getting sub-half-second response times: fast feedback is essential for engaging someone used to the Google auto-complete experience.  The indispensable Tobin Bradley has a screencast here on setting up a similar search.
• “More on this Block…”:  Simple list of hyperlinks that gives the user the quickly check out the tax assessments of your neighbors. Because we’re naturally nosy.
• Attribute Table: You’ll spend the most time agonizing over the background color of your zebra banding.
• Disclaimer:  We’re GIS people–we always include a disclaimer.
• Google Static Map: perfectly in the spirit of a Minimally Viable Product, our map is courtesy of Google’s Static Maps API, just plug in our parcel’s centroid into a request URL and, voila, a map.  Google gives you 25,000 free maps per day (thanks!).

From a techie’s point of view, the above is rather mundane.  But the shocking truth that I’ll expand on in the next post is that the above satisfies the majority of your users. They happily go off to some other corner of the web, content that the information retrieval experience wasn’t too bad.  But for those who need more, we can give them the following without much exertion on our part–

• Bing Maps KML overlay + print capability:  since most commodity hosting has the bare-bones SQLite 2 installed, we can’t provide much in the way of SpatiaLite magic.  But we can store the KML geometry as text in a SQLite 2 text field (not optimal, but still viable).  And through the magic of URL rewrites, we can make each record in our database “look like” it has its own unique KML file to the outside world.  We simply append an address’ unique KML url to Bing Maps and, presto, we have free interactive mapping that even shows our custom logo (no API key necessary). And did you see we mentioned printing?  FACT:  more tears have been shed by geo-developers creating web-map printing capability than actual web maps printed.  We just offload that headache to the fine folks at Bing and call it done.
• KML Download:  as long as we have a unique KML “file” for each feature, let the user download it.  And be sure to mention “Google Earth”:  more people know what Google Earth is than know what a KML file is.

Maintainable Over Time?

Any tech manager knows the value of an application isn’t necessarily in its splashy roll-out but in its maintainability over time.  In our set-up, we can use free command-line tools from the aforementioned SpatiaLite project to automatically load a shapefile into SQLite plus execute SQL commands to clean the data up, create a text field with KML geometry, etc.  We have one client who does their updates using DOS commands in a batch file–how awesomely mid-1990s is that?  But it works, and it’s free: everybody’s happy.

Cost Certainty

A significant impediment to adoption of usage-based cloud solutions is that their costs, while low, are variable.  And nothing exasperates managers and accounting departments than unknown month-to-month costs.  I’ve had clients point-blank tell me they can’t move forward with any solution that involved them wrangling with their Accounting Department once a month.  With commodity hosting, you can one-time purchase storage and bandwidth for 1-3 years at one time.  Again, it’s this kind of conundrum that reminds one that the biggest obstacles to progress aren’t necessarily technological but rather the policies and procedures created in a simpler time.

Website Politics

For government entities that don’t run their own website in-house but rather a 3rd party provider with an inflexible content-management-system (CMS), the options are limited for rolling out spatial content.  A minimalist approach that can be easily be embedded via an <IFRAME> (again, a 1990s web thing) is not optimal but given limited options and resources, it works.

The World We Live In

It’s never been easier to distribute large quantities of data–including spatial data–inexpensively to the public.  But a mistake we see too often made is the assumption that anything relating to geographic information automatically requires something called “GIS”.  Users want to find the one needle in the haystack that is relevant to them–fast.  But they certainly don’t want the haystack dumped on their head, which is what too many traditional map portal experiences feel like.

In the next post we’ll be rounding up a fresh set of web map analytics that reinforce the power of simple, fast specificity.

—Brian Timoney

The launch of Google Maps in 2005 brought with it a new way to think about web maps: “tiles”.  Lots of tiles.  Actually, millions of tiles.  The smooth panning and zooming were awesome, but keeping track of all of those 256 x 256px PNG images was, frankly, a chore.  Even with a computer. And the purists amongst us chafed as this mongrel projection “web mercator”–not exactly conformal, not really Mercator–became the de facto standard.

"Web Mercator?" If your loxodromes aren't straight, keep my name out of your mouth.

So what mapping industry titan would rise up and liberate us from the tyranny of web mercator in the browser?

A guy in California who works for the…The New York Times?

D3.js:  Data Driven Documents

D3 is a javascript library that not only does choropleths, proportional symbols, etc. in the browser (no IE 6-8; we can’t wait up forever), but a stunning array of other types of visualizations.  Which is essential because even we mappers realize that sometimes the best map isn’t a map. A Swiss-army knife of data-display possibility to complement our everyday cudgeling of points, lines, and polygons.

May I Interest You In Some Peirce Quincuncial?

BREAKING:  Projections are back in the browser.

And how!

Those of us of a certain age remember when the education crisis wasn’t basic reading and ‘rithmitic but America’s school children staring at Mercator maps and getting distorted impressions of the relative sizes of continents. And being too impressed with Greenland.  Now we can dazzle impressionable youth with the manifold ways to display an oblate spheroid on a flat screen.

Or heck, just go all in on a spheroid, and spin it, inside your browser.

Cro$$over Skill$

As map-making goes mainstream, geo professionals need to cultivate a skillset less niche and more in demand by those outside the geo silo.  D3–because of its versatility and variety–is much in demand.  A fair grasp of it combined with data munging skills, and you’re looking at a $15K bump in market-value (or your money back).

Small Steps, Incremental Absorption

But that $15K isn’t free money.  D3 has moving parts and a conceptual framework that needs grokking before the cool stuff happens.  Your go-to technique of “COPY-PASTE, TWEAK-‘N-HOPE” isn’t the play here.  Fortunately there are a ton of resources and a new book: with patience and lots of view-source-ing, you’ll be in infoviz-creating mode in due time.

The Tyndale Revolution in Online Mapping

D3 will only accelerate the process that Google kicked off in 2005: the radical democratization of cartography on the web.  In creating the first English translation of the Bible using the new tools of mass publishing, Tyndale effectively broke up the monopoly of the small, elite, Latin-reading guild.  (And got burned at the stake for his trouble–stuff happens.)  Geospatial professionals had a sort of monopoly on map-making: complicated software and obscure data formats kept the guild comfortably small.  Now we see patient explanations of what a shapefile is geared towards the tech-savvy but otherwise uncredentialed outsider. Anyone with a browser and a text-editor can now make compelling maps and distribute them to the utter ends of the earth.  If you’re an industry veteran in this uncertain, sequestered professional environment, you can either devote your energies to pining for a cozy, less demanding past or jump head first into the creative flourishing of a New Golden Age of Cartography that has already arrived.

—Brian Timoney

To celebrate the International Open Data Hackathon Day, I’d like to point out that tomorrow marks the 2nd Anniversary of the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management taking key portions of their GeoCommunicator website offline.  Behold the takedown notice.

So what's the BLM been doing for the last two years?

I’ve blogged about 18 months ago, admittedly with the naive belief that it would get sorted out eventually.   With key datasets pertaining to Oil & Gas leases, mining claims, etc., an ordinary citizen might assume that the problems would be addressed with a modicum of urgency.

The Public Loses Access, But Someone Still Got Paid

But decreased access to BLM data hasn’t been a loss for everyone.  Premier Geospatial, the private sector entity that has the closest relationship with the BLM in the realm of Oil & Gas lease data, sold itself (under its parent entity Xedar) to the international data vendor IHS for…$28  million. A nice payday for someone.

Closed government data is profitable for the chosen few

Which Side Do You Bet On?

While the democratic idealism of open government information is pleasant to ponder, as a business person investing in products and applications built on top of open data you have to make a hard-headed assessment.  Namely, is a government entity’s commitment to the free flow information credible over the long-term?  Or is it ever vulnerable to changing political winds: a new White House administration, a new City Council, a different set of county commissioners?

In the case of the BLM, the smart money turned out to be on bureaucratic dysfunction and intransigence.

Whether the Open Data movement is currently gaining or losing momentum is great fodder for Internet argument. But folks risking their own dollars might well be waiting for the day when the “movement” is backed by real statutory muscle.  Absent a legal compliance structure with teeth, there’s little to protect open data from the worst instincts of those in the public sector who forget too quickly who pays their salaries.

—Brian Timoney