New Community Data Features on OASIS
We are testing some new features on OASIS (the Open Accessible Space Information System), and we’re looking for feedback. We want to make OASIS more open and accessible (pun intended!) for our users. We think that it should be easier to add mapped data to OASIS, and we’d like to test the option of letting anyone add any data layer they want to OASIS (within reason) regardless of whether the mapped information is explicitly related to open space. This would go far to making OASIS a more meaningful community platform for mapping New York’s neighborhoods. This would offer the ease of use of existing platforms like Google Maps, combined with the richly layered mapped data that’s already a part of OASIS.

Some data sets might be small or temporary. For example: wouldn’t it be neat to overlay all of Prospect Park’s destination sites on OASIS’s maps, so you can view them with historical aerial photos? The Prospect Park Alliance website shows the destinations, but doesn’t have the rich detail that OASIS’s maps have.

Or perhaps adding the locations of “stalled development” sites in Brooklyn? City Councilmember Brad Lander’s website highlights these locations (see below), but not along with maps of land use patterns, other housing sites, legislative districts, and more that OASIS provides.

Screengrab from bradlander.com/stalleddevelopment

Other data sets might be fascinating but totally unrelated to parks and community gardens. For example: 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire that took the lives of almost 150 workers and provided a tragic but powerful rallying cry for the then-nascent labor movement. Researchers have mapped where each of the victims lived. But what if we could view these locations on OASIS, overlaying historical maps simultaneously with the current street grid, imagining what we might have seen 100 years ago as we walk to the subway along the same path that an immigrant worker in the Triangle factory strode along a century ago?

Last year, New York City was hit with a blizzard that caught city officials unprepared. The local public radio station (WNYC) mapped the locations of people who called in with reports of whether their streets were plowed or not. What if we could view these spots with maps (that we have on OASIS) of demographics, zoning, land use, schools, and transit?

With each of these examples, maybe some interesting geographic patterns would turn up, or maybe not. But at the very least it would be intriguing to open up OASIS as a platform for creating and analyzing visual correlations like these — and more. The sky’s the limit. The only thing holding us back — till now — was the technology.

Fusion Tables & OASIS
Last year Google developed a new service called Fusion Tables that could make this vision a reality. Fusion Tables enables you to quickly upload a list of items (like a spreadsheet) or create one from scratch, save it online, map it (if it includes location information), and share it with the world. The Center for Urban Research’s application architect David Burgoon was able to integrate the Fusion Tables service into OASIS.

Screengrab from oasisnyc.net

In order to test Fusion Tables with OASIS, we have added a “Community Data” tab to the right of the map and we have provided links to several data sets already in Fusion Tables so you can try it out. These are: Daffodil planting locations in 2011 from New Yorkers for Parks (the Daffodil Project is a living memorial to September 11, 2001); the locations of the Triangle shirtwaist fire victims; and waterfront access locations in New York and New Jersey. Eventually you’ll be able to add your own data from Fusion Tables (or any table that’s already been created in Fusion Tables), simply by typing the table ID number in a text entry box on the OASIS map page.

If you’re familiar with Fusion Tables, you know that there are many options you can configure. While we’re testing how this new feature works with OASIS, keep the following things in mind if you’d like to suggest Fusion Tables data we should add: Visibility of your data table must be public or unlisted; it must be exportable; it needs to be point data; and it has to have a location column.

Community Map Layers
We’re also testing a feature that’s somewhat more labor intensive, but nonetheless powerful. And it doesn’t have the limitations of Fusion Tables, in that it can be any type of geographic feature, not just “point” locations. Scroll down the Legend tab in OASIS, and you’ll now see a section called “Community Maps (beta).” For now, this only includes one layer (described below). But think of it as a placeholder for other types of information that you think would be useful as part of OASIS’s maps.

Community Maps Test Layer

The map layer we’ve added as a test case shows the areas in western Queens that were impacted by a power blackout in July 2006. For weeks that summer, tens of thousands of residents and businesses were without electricity. Though power was eventually restored, people were justifiably upset and took legal action against Con Ed. The utility eventually entered into an agreement with these groups to provide almost $8 million to invest in energy-efficiency and environmental projects in the Western Queens community affected by the power outage. The NY State Public Service Commission selected a local foundation, the North Star Fund, to administer this project because of the Fund’s expertise in facilitating community led grantmaking processes.

Although the Fund, with Con Ed’s help, has mapped the affected areas and the groups receiving funds, OASIS is supplementing this effort. We’ve added the affected areas map to the OASIS site, making it easy for people involved in the program to easily see which properties are inside or outside the affected areas, what community assets (such as community gardens and schools) are located in the area, and what elected officials represent the areas.

Next Steps
The Community Maps section of OASIS enables us to add maps that may be short-term, focused on specific locations, or change regularly as local needs change or issues evolve.

What are your thoughts? What criteria do you think we should use to add map layers? How much value does this bring to local community organizations? (compared with something like Google Maps, for example.) Should we add layers to this section indefinitely, or only use this to display time-limited information? What Fusion Tables data would you like to see added? We are eager to hear from you. Email your feedback to oasisnyc@gc.cuny.edu.

This is an abbreviated version of a post published on the OASIS wiki, where you can find further information and instructions on testing these new community features.

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Steven Romalewski directs the CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research, CUNY Graduate Center. His 25-year career has centered around accessing, understanding, analyzing, and publicizing data for public policy development, community planning, and research purposes. He lives in Manhattan.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Before Google Maps inspired a world of neogeographers, the USDA Forest Service saw the value in creating a map mashup of open space resources in New York City.  With an online interactive map, local open space advocates could visualize the concentration – or absence – of parks, community gardens, wetlands, and other green infrastructure in every city neighborhood and at a citywide scale.

To realize that vision, in late 2000 the Forest Service convened almost 40 greening groups, educators, individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and public agencies to guide a new initiative: the Open Accessible Space Information System (OASIS).  The committee selected a nonprofit mapping project to develop the interactive maps, and in March 2001 the OASIS website at www.oasisnyc.net was launched.  (The list of participating organizations has since grown to more than 60 groups).

OASIS quickly became a valuable and widely used online tool.  City agencies rely on it, design firms use it regularly, and community groups and schools describe it as invaluable.  It receives tens of thousands of visits each year from people who use it to make more than one million maps annually.  Its scope has broadened to include not only mapped information about parks and gardens, but also transit routes, buildings, detailed property data and land use patterns, housing, schools and more, in order to help visualize the nexus between community greening and broader urban planning issues.  In 2005, William Neuman referred to it in The New York Times it as a “great source of information about the built environment in New York City.”

It has become a platform for understanding how the built environment shapes – and is shaped by – the city’s natural areas and habitats. OASIS fills a niche.  Though it was launched and supported in its early years by the Forest Service, it is neither a public agency project nor a for-profit venture nor its own nonprofit.  Instead, it sits in-between.  For example, it provides access to parcel-by-parcel data and mapped land use patterns across the five boroughs.  But unlike for-profit real estate mapping sites, OASIS provides free access to this data, helping to level the playing field for groups and individuals trying to make sense of development changes across the city. It’s the people’s mapping site for property data and maps.  By “people” we mean everyone from urban planning students, community gardeners, real property professionals, urban design firms and architects, city agency staff, teachers, neighborhood groups and community boards, the media, and more, based on user surveys and web usage reports.

And unlike New York’s Citymap application or other agency websites, OASIS brings together mapped information from many sources – not only from city agencies, but from state and federal government, private sources, and local community groups.  It therefore provides a multi-faceted and more realistic picture of what’s actually happening “on the ground” in ways that no single government entity would provide.  For example, a property that’s home to a thriving community garden might be considered vacant by the city’s real property tax assessors.  Though both views are valid, the city’s websites would only present the “vacant” information.  OASIS captures and displays both.

Also, OASIS’s purpose transcends individual agencies and organizations.  Although the project began with a focus on open space resources (and still includes a great deal of open space data), it has become a platform for understanding how the built environment shapes – and is shaped by – the city’s natural areas and habitats.  It visualizes the complexity of spatial relationships between the local, citywide, and regional scales of the city’s civic infrastructure.  And with the recent integration of demographic data from the 2000 Census and the Forest Service’s research on local environmental stewards, overlays now exist that display elements of the city’s social terrain as it relates to the environment and urban infrastructure.

But even though the site is valuable and well-used, its mapping and web technology had become outmoded, eclipsed by Google and others.  (In an online survey in 2006, many users rated the OASIS website as “good to excellent”, but a typical complaint was that the site was too slow, and people often requested more data and more up-to-date data.)  To keep OASIS relevant, this year the CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research completely revamped and upgraded the website, integrating new mapping and website technology, adding more and newer data sets, and designing the site to allow for more interactivity.  Here’s a sampling of what you can find and do at “OASIS 2.0”:


LOCATION REPORTS



Zoom to the area of the proposed Atlantic Yards site (or any other proposed development project) and view the existing buildings, community gardens, playgrounds, and institutions that would be impacted. Click from property to property to identify ownership, zoning, FAR (Floor Area Ratio), and more. Clicking the “camera icon” for each property will display a bird’s eye photo. (At the Atlantic Yards site, you can see recent housing built across the street.) Zoom out to see the larger area in Brooklyn and add layers of population characteristics.

When you click on a property or search for an address or tax lot, OASIS’s “Location Report” offers details about the spot you clicked. For individual properties, this includes land use, ownership, and other data from the city’s land use files maintained by the City Planning Department. It also provides property-specific links to the city’s Department of Buildings website, Department of Finance tax assessment profile, ACRIS (Automated City Register Information System), and the city’s new “digital tax map” website that provides precise lot measurements and a history of lot changes. Location reports also integrate Yahoo! local search results, so any commercial activity at the lot that Yahoo has info about will appear. Community Boards and legislative districts are identified, as is relevant information about a park, school, or stewardship turf (see below) that your selection might fall on.


COMBINED SEWER OVERFLOW


Ever wonder where rainwater goes when it washes off city streets?  It pours into a “combined sewer overflow” (CSO) system and then empties out of more than 400 CSO pipes (sometimes mixed with raw sewage) into the nearest river or bay.  These outfall pipes are mapped on OASIS, and you can click on each one to see a bird’s eye view of it (images at right).  Are they near local parks, beaches, or fishing spots?  Are the outfalls filtered to prevent “floatables” (pieces of trash) from emptying into the waterway?

Once you zoom in to the CSO of interest (or any other spot on the map), the new version of OASIS provides a “print” link, enabling you to annotate your map, print it with a custom title, and/or save the map image itself as a PNG graphic. Or you can include a link to each map in your blog, on Twitter, or via email. Community gardening groups such as GreenThumb and Green Guerillas already use this so their website visitors can zoom directly to community garden maps on OASIS.


STEWARDSHIP MAPPING


New York City is home to several thousand local environmental organizations, some focused on a specific block or community garden, others involved with regional parks or habitats, others advocating for citywide greening policies. Through a partnership with the USDA Forest Service’s “Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project” (STEW-MAP), you can visualize the spatial relationships and overlapping turfs of these organizations. OASIS has a dedicated search page for the STEW-MAP groups, so you can zoom in on specific turfs, search for stewards by type and area of interest, and view citywide maps of overlapping turfs for each type of steward.

When you click on a group’s name in the list, you’ll go directly to its turf on the OASIS map. You can see if any other turfs overlap with this one, who’s involved in stewardship nearby, and what natural habitats are in the vicinity.


MANNAHATTA


This year marks the 400^th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of his eponymous river.  To help New Yorkers understand our city’s ecological foundations, the Wildlife Conservation Society created The Mannahatta Project to map the ecosystems, soil types, shoreline, waterways, and native American trails in Manhattan circa 1609.  WCS partnered with OASIS so this data could be overlain with maps of Manhattan’s contemporary environment as a teachable moment. After 400 years of dramatic changes, how will we manage our urban ecosystem for the future?


HISTORICAL IMAGERY


The integration of historical aerial photos provides a compelling visual narrative about local development.  Here’s an example: on Staten Island, the Kreischer Hill Woods covers 130 acres of rare plant species and important ecological communities.  In 1996, the area was still pristine (see above).  By overlaying tax block and lot boundaries on the image and using OASIS’s aerial timeline slider, we can see that by 2004, some type of property improvement had taken place.  By 2006, the aerial images show that a shopping center with Home Depot, Target, and other stores had been built and parking lots had paved over a former pristine environment.

• • •

The Open Accessible Space Information System in New York – as concept, collaborative partnership, and mapping website – will soon be 10 years old.  It has survived and thrived so far for several key reasons.  Its mission is still valid – a common, free, open space inventory via a web-based GIS mapping resource is invaluable to the city’s greening and planning communities.  Its structure is flexible enough to evolve by accommodating new groups and interests, integrating new data sets, and seeking new and varied funding sources.  And the partnership groups and website managers share an interest in harnessing new online tools in practical ways for a wide array of users.

The new version of OASIS emphasizes ease of use, interactivity, and user input. The relationships that provide user input are diverse and are brokered by the project team. For example, The Academy for Urban Planning in Bushwick is hoping to photograph every CSO in the city, map all of them, and learn more about their impacts.  The Academy can integrate these photos (posted on Flickr) into OASIS’s maps and use the site to help locate CSOs.  The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC has asked listeners to map the locations of “halted development” sites.  One next step is to add this mapped data to OASIS, visualize it in the context of their surrounding neighborhoods and land use, and invite OASIS’s users to add more information about the sites to build a more complete data set.  If the Parks Department’s street tree census data is added to OASIS, residents and business owners could see each tree near their property and upload more precise information about location and condition to help the city care for the trees.  This and more is possible with OASIS 2.0.

Will OASIS continue to provide value for another 10 years?  That’s hard to answer, but it’s worth revisiting a strategic plan developed in 2004-06. One of the reports prepared for the plan noted that for some people, “OASIS is a web site, purely and simply.”  Others noted that the project has facilitated coalitions and networking on issues around open space in the city that otherwise would not have occurred.  The project offers a unique opportunity for users to interact with a mix of data about both social and physical geography that is not otherwise available in one location online.  Its value as an educational resource cannot be underestimated, serving as a research tool for students from grade school through graduate school, as well as a tool for adults to utilize visual data for planning and advocacy.  Perhaps most important, use of the website and participation in the partnership is free, and both provide great value.

If the environment that allowed these ingredients to come together and flourish continues, it’s likely that OASIS will continue.  It will evolve and take on different constituencies, but if history is a guide, this evolution will add to the project’s strengths and value.

Steven Romalewski directs the CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research, CUNY Graduate Center.  His 25-year career has centered around accessing, understanding, analyzing, and publicizing data for public policy development, community planning, and research purposes.  He lives in Chelsea, Manhattan.

Two people at CUNY work closely with Romalewski on the OASIS project: David Burgoon, application architect for the CUNY Mapping Service, and Christy Spielman, GIS and graphic design professional.  Burgoon completely reprogrammed and recoded the OASIS site, and Spielman has been involved with OASIS since its inception, responsible for much of its cartographic and web designs, data management, partnerships, and overall guidance.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.