TM
The Open Indicators Consortium (OIC):
A Local, Regional, National and
International Resource
William Mass
Director, Center for Industrial Competitiveness
Associate Professor, Regional Economic and Social Development
and
Andrew Dufilie
Lead Engineer, Open Indicators Consortium
Doctoral Student, Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Presentation at
National University of Ireland - Galway
March 8-9, 2010
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Outline
• Overview of Open Indicators Consortium
• Description of Weave Software
• Demonstrations
National Alliance of Community Economic Development
Associations (NACEDA) will soon announce
The Open Indicators Consortium ‘s WEAVE software won
NACEDA’s
“Managing Neighborhood Change Diagnostic Tool” Competition
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
The Open Indicators Consortium
Leadership Team
William Mass
Director, Center for Industrial Competitiveness
Associate Professor, Regional Economic and Social Development
and
Georges Grinstein
Director, Institute for Visualization and Perception Research
Professor, Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Charlotte Kahn
Director, Boston Indicators Project
The Boston Foundation
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Georges Grinstein
• Founder IEEE Visualization Conference (1990)
• Co-chair InfoVis and VAST Competitions for last 6 years
• Past member of ANSI (chair of X3H3.6), ISO (US rep) and
IFIP (co-chair) for Computer Graphics
• Over 100 grants, many papers, book chapters, keynotes, …
• Part of DHS Center of Excellence in Visual Analytics
• Co-author of Interactive Data Visualization: Foundations,
Techniques & Applications (Feb 2010, AK Peters)
• Director of Institute for Visualization and Perception Research
and the Center for Biomolecular and Medical Informatics
• Developed commercial software since 1985 (some still
running), 4 startups, on BOD of several companies, patents in
visualization, information retrieval, haptics, sonification
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Charlotte Kahn
• Co-Founder and Director, Boston Indicators Project (BIP) at
• The Boston Foundation is the 2nd largest Community
Foundation in the United States
• BIP is recognized as best in class globally as a metro-region
indicators project
• President, Community Indicators Consortium (2010-2011),
the national association of over 200 indicators projects, a
global community of practice
• Former Director, Boston Persistent Poverty Project, a sixcity Rockefeller Foundation initiative.
• Awarded Loeb Fellowship, Harvard Graduate School of
Design.
• Founding member, National Neighborhood Indicators
Partnership at the Urban Institute
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Vision & Values:
Open Source and Open Access
Developed for Nonprofits and Public Agencies
• Functionality developed in response to a diverse group of
stakeholders’ needs and preferences to create a flexible and
general platform
• Uses state-of-the-art online software for local micro (lot and
street level) & shared macro (county) data for analysis,
visualization and comparison
• Open source for broad use and innovation through
collaboration locally, nationally and globally
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Open Indicators Consortium Members
Founding Members
1. Metro Boston/Boston, MA (MAPC & Boston Indicators
Project)
2. Metro Atlanta/Atlanta, GA (Neighborhood Nexus
Partnership)
3. Arizona, Innovation and County Indicators (AZ State U.)
4. Metro Chicago/Chicago, IL (Chicago Metropolitan
Agency for Planning)
5. Columbus/Central Ohio, (Community Research Partners)
6. Connecticut (CERC & State Agencies)
7. Rhode Island (RI Dept. of Education, Providence Plan)
8. Knight Foundation Match Grant: Lowell, Boston, New
Haven, RI
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
The Fundamental Mission
• Enable data visualization of any available data
anywhere by anyone for any purpose
(under administrative and user controls)
–to provide data visibility and increase access
–to increase data understanding and knowledge
–to support exploration and comparisons
–to enable planning and accountability
–to support communication and collaboration
–to enable innovation and creativity
–to facilitate data dissemination and distribution
–to solve complex problems needing multiple people and
organizations
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Three Types of Visualizations
• Exploratory
–Have no hypotheses about the data
–Explore interactively undirected for structures, trends, ...
–Result is visualization of data
• Confirmatory
–Have specific hypotheses about the data
–Goal-oriented examination of the hypotheses
–Result is a visualization that confirms or rejects hypotheses
• Presentation
–Facts to be presented are fixed a priori
–Select appropriate presentation techniques
–Result is a high-quality visualization to present known facts
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Exploratory
Confirmatory
UMass Lowell Experience
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Large Systems
Annotation Systems
Recommendation Systems
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Civic Engagement Goals
• Fill the vacuum of highly consumable, quality data for the use
of stakeholder communication Data Rich, Insight Poor
–explore and communicate local community and economic
conditions
–enable regional, national, global comparisons
–have stakeholders define and shape the new tools for
visualization and collaboration: charts, scorecards,
dashboards, narrations and animations
–support advanced use of visualizations in local blogs,
websites, newspapers and television
–provide visual and analytic information for public debate and
community problem solving
–promote timely collaboration on program and budget planning
–support greater governmental, foundation, organizational
transparency and accountability
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Weave Demo Screen Snapshots
• Each of the following static images depicts highly
interactive visualizations on customizable web sites
with nested indicators
• Same or similar indicators from detailed granular
to high level geographies (from census tract to
international comparisons)
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
From local micro data
©2010 University of Massachusetts
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To national county data
©2010 University of Massachusetts
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To global data
©2010 University of Massachusetts
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Medical Device Firms
Data by Establishment
©2010 University of Massachusetts
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Medical Device Firms:
Data by Region
©2010 University of Massachusetts
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M edic a l D evic e Firm s
P ro duc t C la s s es by R eg io n
©2010 University of Massachusetts
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Diverse Local/Regional/State Partnerships
Capacity Building & Collaboration: CBOs, regional councils, community
foundations, state agencies
– Boston: Metropolitan Area Planning Council, The Boston Indicators Project at
the Boston Foundation
– Atlanta: Office of University-Community Partnerships at Emory University,
Community Foundation of Atlanta, Casey Foundation’s Atlanta Civic Site,
Atlanta Regional Commission, United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia
State University, Atlanta Regional Health Forum, City of Atlanta
– Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning partners with Chicago Community
Trust
– Columbus: Community Research Partners collaborates with Mid-Ohio Regional
Planning Commission (MORPC)
– Arizona: Arizona State University with partners and community foundations
– Connecticut: CT Economic Resource Center, DataHaven, Graustein Memorial
Fund, United Way of Coastal Fairfield County, CT Early Childhood Education
Cabinet
– Rhode Island: Rhode Island Department of Primary and Secondary Education
partners with The Providence Plan
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Open Indicators Consortium Growth
Sample Potential Future Members, Affiliates,
Funders, Sponsors
1) US Census Bureau – LEHD OnTheMap update
2) Data Quality Campaign (Education)
3) National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership at the Urban
Institute (34 US cities)
4) Bureau of Labor Statistics, QCEW Division
5) MA Department of Early Education & Child Care
6) MA Department of Public Health
7) Warner Babcock Green Chemistry Institute
8) Institute of Museums and Library Services (Data.gov)
9) National University of Ireland-Galway and Partners
©2010 University of Massachusetts
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The UMass Lowell Team
• Computer Science Department
– 6 Professors
– 1 Postdoctoral student
– 8 Graduate students
– 4 Undergraduate students
• Regional Economic and Social Development Department
– 2 Professors
– 6 Graduate students
• Staff
– 2 Staff (Administrative & Technical) with diverse industry experience
– 1 Technical writer
Faculty and graduate students have degrees from US, China, Ghana,
India, Israel and many also have successful commercial software
experience
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Consortium Activities
• Member Communication
– Semi-annual in-person meetings
– Conference calls every 2 weeks
– State-of-the-art on-line communication
• Software and Data Development
– Weave (Web-based Analysis & Visualization Environment)
– Curating pertinent national and global data available
• Branding/Marketing
– OpenIndicators.com, .org, .us…
– Demos and videos
– New partners, data providers, fundraising
©2010 University of Massachusetts
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Current Release 0.6
• Founding members have a release
– with their own data for mapping and data visualization
• Agile development process
– release frequently with continuous user feedback
– management structure and operational responsibilities to
assure collaboration, integration & cross training within UML
and with OIC member staff
• Members have their own sites
– up for internal testing and/or public access
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Achievements in Current Releases
• High performance
–High level of interactivity (fast response time)
–Broad usability support (e.g., choices for color deficient
individuals, session support)
• Visual and analysis tools to enable deep analysis
and critical thinking
– several types of visualizations on the same page
– all linked (selections in one highlighted in others)
– Statistical and computational services (via SOA)
• Support for flexible/custom web page look and feel
©2010 University of Massachusetts
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Second-Year Development (2010)
• Session history
– for personalization
– to save multiple states and preferences
– to understand web usage and patterns
• Collaborative visual tools
– to enable joint analysis from multiple sites
– to provide support and training
– with integrated voice chat
• Modern reports
– classic hardcopy with images
– interactive animations on web pages
• Controlled and secure user and data access
– based on groups
• Ontology and Middleware
– to support search for data and trend similarities across OIC member and
National Data Commons sites
Software architecture is already designed for these features
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
3 Levels of Users
• Advanced levels for researchers
– developed first as most demanding
– high performance, analysis tools on demand, dynamic reports
• Beginner and Intermediate levels
– current development with beta testing
– simpler analysis and visualizations, simple reporting
all with training materials to encourage
experimentation and capacity building
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Open Indicators Software Innovations
• Open Source
– Software will be released in by December 2010 as an open source
resource for non-profits and public agencies
– Open standards used throughout sofware (Flex, Geoserver, Apache, …)
• Technological innovation
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
MicroAPI
Incremental compression of shape files
Anticipatory computation
Continuous zoom
Ease of data import
Session history
Collaboration
– And much more on the data side
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Client
Flex Application(s)
Architecture
Web Services
HTTP
Centralized Server (at UML, …)
HTTP Server
HTML/JavaScript and Flash
Web Services
Interface to Middleware
OIC Site Lookup Services
Consortium Directory Services
Ontology Definition Services
etc…
Consortium Member Site running Middleware
Data Server
•Site defined
data access
•Ontology
mapping
Shape Server
GeoServer
R Server
(statistics /
models)
App Server
(other servers
for additional
functionality)
©2010 University of Massachusetts
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Collaboration
GeoServer
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Network Security &
Anonymization
©2010 University of Massachusetts
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Weave 2.0 and 3.0 Plans
•
•
•
•
•
•
Tools for comparative/similarity studies
National Data Locator
Ontology editor and support
Vision-impaired user support
Report generator with dynamics
Intelligent visualizations
©2010 University of Massachusetts
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Why Should NUIG & Partners
Join OIC?
•
•
•
•
•
•
Leverage resources for priority applications
Early learning from local server installation
Influence on design priorities in agile development
First Mover in EU – Competitive Advantage
Potential collaboration in coding
Prestige from participation in high visibility
international collaboration
• Help drive international standards
©2010 University of Massachusetts
TM
Demos
©2010 University of Massachusetts