Crime Mapping: GIS Goes Mainstream

Thursday October 11th 2001
Filed Under Features, Industry, Spatial Analysis 

“I can cut crime in half in any city in this country.” So uttered are the first words of Police Chief Jack Mannion, played by Craig T. Nelson in CBS’ new series “The District. The premise of this new show is an aggressive Police Chief who uses innovative tactics to reduce crime through analysis involving mapping. The first shows ends with Mannion unveiling COMSTAT, a crime-mapping tool that allows the fictional Washington D.C. police department the ability to view crime patterns. While the show is fictional, it is loosely based on the real-life events of former New York Deputy Police Commissioner Jack Maple. COMSTAT is also a real-life crime program, which was first created by the New York City Police and Transit Authority to help cut crime. During his short-tenure, Jack Maple was able to help turn New York from a crime-ridden city to a place where people felt comfortable jogging in Central Park again. Read more

Geography Markup Language (GML) 2.0 - Enabling the Geo-spatial Web

Wednesday October 10th 2001
Filed Under Features, XML Based 

Ron Lake is the President of Galdos Systems Inc., a company that provides advanced software tools to enable the delivery of services over the Internet, in particular GML and Application Service Providers (ASP). Ron Lake is a well known innovator in the field of geo-spatial information systems and the primary author for Geography Markup Language (GML). Ron Lake has also written several articles on GML for a variety of online publications. His company won a contract with the Census Bureau to provide GML-based translations for TIGER files. Read more