GeoHub Partnership Uses GIS to Open Up Los Angeles Data

Through a partnership with Esri, Los Angeles will put its data sets on an open platform, allowing citizens to become fact gatherers to deal with such problems as illegal dumping and potholes.

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(TNS) -- Esri founder Jack Dangermond held up his map technology company’s partnership with the city of Los Angeles as a path to the future Monday in the opening session of the Esri User Conference in San Diego.

Esri is an innovator in geographic information systems, which combine geographic data with other statistics for the purposes of analysis. More than 350,000 organizations worldwide use its products.

Its partnership with Los Angeles is called GeoHub.

GeoHub makes Los Angeles an open city with open data, said guest speaker Lilian Coral, L.A.’s chief data officer.

In the partnership, announced in January, the city put its data sets on an open platform, allowing citizens to become fact gatherers to deal with such problems as illegal dumping and potholes.

Coral announced that the project is being expanded to include mayor Eric Garcetti’s Vision Zero initiative to end traffic deaths.

“GeoHub is an essential part of the foundation that will make Los Angeles stronger and more responsive for the next century,” Garcetti said in a video message.

Addressing thousands of people from 130 countries, Dangermond said that mining big data in real time with the help of social media can put more eyes on problems than ever before.

“GIS is increasingly understood as a platform for public engagement,” Dangermond said.

His 90-minute introduction to the conference included presenting an award to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, accepted by administrator Craig Fugate.

Fugate said GIS is being used in FEMA’s response to flooding in West Virginia.

Dangermond outlined a number of new products intended to bring speed and drag-and-drop simplicity to mining big data.

He said technological innovation creates enormous possibilities for collaboration between government, business, nonprofits and people around the globe.

“The world is being wired up with everything,” he said. “What do we do with all this data?”

©2016 The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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