What can GIS do? – A Story of AI, Data, and Equity

Earlier this year, Mara and I had the opportunity to present on the plenary stage at the 2024 Esri Partner Conference. Our moment in the spotlight focused on harnessing the power of GeoAI, along with data analytics, to help address complex geospatial issues around sidewalks and equity.  

Follow along as I dive into the story we told on stage! 

One of our goals at dymaptic is to help people get the most out of their GIS – to serve as a trusted partner that helps our clients succeed using GIS. 

Beyond that, we are a group of smart, innovative folks who want to build interesting things by combining technologies to create the best solutions for our clients. We listen to our clients and utilize the best tools available to build exactly what they need. And it’s working. Our clients keep coming back to us again and again. In fact, over 90% of our clients have come back to us for additional work. 

We genuinely care about our clients and are invested in their success. We can run our own successful business by doing what people need and want without being evil. 

So, what does that mean for us, our clients, and our approach? It means starting with what I call a “Common Operating System” that defines all of the different tools that the team uses, interacts with, and collaborates with. 

A Common Operating System (a play on the Common Operating Picture, used in military and emergency response contexts) refers to systems, groups of systems, tools, and people working together toward a common goal. This isn’t a standard industry term, but I think it gets the point across. We need to say something more than “systems” because, as the complexity of “systems” grows and the number of applications and tools increases, you end up with not just “systems of systems” but “systems of systems upon systems.” It quickly becomes turtles all the way down!

Although saying “it’s turtles all the way down” is fun, I think that Common Operating System gets the point across a bit better. 

Notice that I include People in my definition of a Common Operating System. This is on purpose! People play a pivotal role in making these systems work. Even with AI, humans are still, and should still be, in control of what is happening. 

Of course, in the middle of all of this is the fabric that stitches together the Common Operating System: GIS. 

The GIS, the core of your Common Operating System, serves as the central hub to increase coordination between departments (people) and systems (software). But just having GIS software isn’t enough! You have to leverage it, use it, and manage it, which includes things like: 

• Using tools like ArcGIS Monitor to keep up with your environments. 

• Building business processes to convert from paper to digital workflows. 

• Getting your data into central locations - places where you can see and use that data. 

• Embracing your digital twin. You really have to love your data! ❤️ 

That’s how we work with each client—we start with the core of their Common Operating System and work with their team to find the right configurations, integrations, and apps to optimize their systems (a.k.a. systems of systems upon systems) and remove obstacles. This allows them to spend less time navigating systems and more time running their businesses.  

The City of Houston Public Works department is one client we have helped through this process. We’ve worked with them for several years to manage their extensive ArcGIS Enterprise ecosystem. With their GIS as the starting point, we embarked on an innovation project to help them ensure equitable capital projects. The starting question was – how should the city decide where to build new sidewalks? 

An excellent first step when working on capital improvement or other community projects is to ask the community. In this case, the City wanted to ask the citizens of Houston “howdy, where do you want a sidewalk?”  

To enable this, we created an interactive application prototype where citizens can draw new sidewalks. Anyone in the city can easily zoom into their neighborhood, draw a sidewalk, and submit their ideas. They can even give kudos to sidewalks that others have entered, helping to engage the community in a more social way. 

The second step was to figure out how to analyze the data.  

For this, we started with the CDC's Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), which provides data at the census tract level across four themes - socioeconomic status, household composition, race/ethnicity/language, and housing/transportation. We needed more detail, so we leveraged machine learning to transform the data to look at the block group level.  

Then, we needed information about the location of existing sidewalks. We were able to leverage some existing data along with GeoAI to extract existing sidewalk polylines. This got us to workable data so much faster than other techniques. 

We also examined the availability of services across the city, such as libraries, schools, and community centers. This helped us create a custom theme for the SVI to find socially vulnerable areas that would most benefit from sidewalks, or what we called the Sidewalk Vulnerability Index. 

So now, we have our crowd-sourced data about where people want sidewalks, the City's Sidewalk Vulnerability Index, and the existing sidewalk data. It’s time to present our findings and tools! 

In the third and final step of this project, we delivered the data and the application. We built a dashboard to help City decision-makers make well-informed, data-driven decisions in future planning. They can examine potential sidewalk projects and see the vulnerability level of the surrounding area, focusing on the areas most in need of sidewalks. At this time, the City is evaluating how this prototype can be used to apply SVI data to its decision-making process.  

The lessons here are simple - start with GIS and build your Common Operating System around it. Engage the community, analyze, and then deliver the data in an easy-to-understand format that facilitates making good, data-driven decisions and policies. 

We’re excited to see how this technology has the potential to benefit the City of Houston and all the citizens who rely upon sidewalks for safe transportation and mobility. Even more so, we’re excited to keep using GIS to have a positive impact, which is precisely why dymaptic exists.