Local GIS Tidbits
The British Columbia city of Nanaimo has built nearly 20 SketchUp models of buildings in its downtown to send to Google for approval and integration into Google Earth. City employees and members of the community are doing the modeling using “Sketchup Pro and Google Pro, along with a photo of a particular building’s facade.”
Washington DC has updated its sex offender registry and mapping app to include the ability for residents to search the database based on addresses. Until now, that is, since 2001, users could only search by the cryptic Police Service Area (PSA). There are 45 of those in the district and citizens don’t generally know in which one they live. Now visitors can find offenders who live or work within a 1/4 or 1/2 mile radius of an address. Many comments on the site on the matter pushed the Police Dept to update the app (built on Google Maps) with the new functionality.
The Alcohol and Substance Abuse Council of Jefferson County Inc. (New York) aims “to gather community agencies and organizations to get them on board with using geographic information system mapping to examine the density of alcohol outlets in the north country and compare that data with various social, criminal and health-related trends.” I guess there’s no licensing of these outlets or perhaps they are looking for illegal ones. For now there’s no GIS and the group is just looking for local support to follow the lead of a graduate project of Robert S. Pezzolesi which shows that focused interventions on the alcohol environment can help other social ills.
