Geographic Information
Systems (GIS) power our world. GIS helps us find the quickest way to a
destination, map out property boundaries across a county, and even allows
emergency responders to better prepare for natural disasters. GIS is the
underbelly of so many functions we rely on, and yet, it still has a long way
before being fully optimized, reliable, and efficient for daily tasks, or major
problem-solving.
The GIS Solutions Challenge is seeking
innovators to build a set of tools which the open source GIS community can use
to discover specific, scalable, useful, and reliable business insights.
Why issue a Challenge?
Extremely large organizations using GIS
have developed internal systems to increase the accuracy, efficiency, and
reliability of their GIS processes when handling large amounts of data. While
many large organizations utilise expensive GIS systems, many resource-constrained
organizations and individual innovators turn to open source and affordable
platforms. Although small organizations have access to open source GIS tools,
these technologies do not allow for the analysis of large datasets. Be it a
lack of computational power, speed, or accuracy, current open source tools for
smaller organizations are lacking. Bringing the open-source and GIS communities
together to solve this issue can not only help us at Tax Management Associates
derive new business insights in for local governments, but it can help to
improve the very systems of direction, safety, and business we all rely on.
The Challenge Breakthrough
The GIS Solutions Challenge asks
innovators to develop scalable, efficient, and effective open source tools that
generate useful business insights from geospatial data, which can solve three
specific GIS problems for large datasets (please see the challenge guidelines
for a complete description):
- What is the geodesic distance
between two features?
- E.g., A particular street
corner in Detroit is known to be a crime hotspot. How far is this hotspot
from the area the police actively patrols? This distance would be
measured as a straight line from point to the edge of a polygon.
- What is the network distance
between two features?
- E.g., What is the actual
distance police must travel from the edge of their patrol to reach a
crime hotspot? This distance would take into account the specific route
the police must travel to reach the hotspot.
- Is a point inside or outside a
polygon?
- E.g., Is the crime hotspot
within a police patrol area?
Innovators will be provided three sample
data sets to solve the above challenge and will be asked in Phase 1 to create
and share a proof-of-concept, which can then be used in Phase 2, where
innovators will need to develop a fully functional GIS solution that will be
tested against a number of technical requirements, such as efficiency,
effectiveness, usefulness, innovativeness, and accuracy, among other factors.
Competitors can enter Phase 2 even if they did not enter Phase 1. Beyond a cash
prize, the winners will have contributed to creating an open-source GIS
solution that that can benefit people and organizations globally.
What You Can Do Right Now
- Click Accept Challenge below
to register for the challenge and subscribe to updates
- Read the full details in the
competition guidelines
- Introduce yourself in the
forum
- Share this challenge with your
friends, family, and colleagues!
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