In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau launched The Opportunity Project, “a process for engaging government, communities, and the technology industry to create digital tools that address our greatest challenges as a nation”.
Each year, The Opportunity Project (TOP) brings together government agencies, technologists, and communities for 12-week technology development sprints. These sprints focus on addressing various problem statements and using open data to create digital tools that enhance American economic opportunity. Technologists collaborate with stakeholders, end users, and product advisors to build these tools and apps. Finally, they unveil their creations during Demo Day at the Census headquarters.
The Challenge
This past year, Spatial Networks had the privilege to work on a sprint team tasked with working closely with the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Transportation to help Tribal, State, and Local Governments with local address data collection. More specifically, our challenge was to develop resources to help stakeholders create and maintain open address point data.
The Problem statement
State and local governments often lack databases of addresses with geospatial coordinates, which are essential for emergency response. Proprietary or legal issues sometimes restrict access to available address point data. Many governments also struggle to secure the resources needed to plan, implement, and maintain address point data collection. Overcoming these challenges requires software tools, starter data, human capital, and well-defined collection processes and guidelines.
The Importance of open address data
Accurate open address data is important at all levels of government for a variety of different purposes. At the Tribal, State, and Local level, this data is used to help meet the immediate needs of residents and businesses during catastrophic events, when traditional infrastructure such as street signs and landmarks may no longer be visible. At the Federal level, the USDOT relies on address data for the National 911 Program, the Census Bureau uses it to support citizen counts and surveys, and other departments depend on address information for mail delivery, land use planning, public health, and other vital services.
Leveraging a SaaS data collection program
Instead of building a bespoke product or custom application, we proposed using Fulcrum, our existing data collection platform. Commercial users, as well as humanitarian and disaster response communities, have successfully deployed Fulcrum since 2011.
The Fulcrum Community program enables rapid deployment in situations that require field users to quickly collect or disseminate open data. This capability proves especially crucial in disaster response and humanitarian assistance efforts. Leveraging an existing data collection platform for these challenges offers numerous advantages. Below, I’ve highlighted several key benefits.
Fulcrum Community is commercially supported, but available free of charge for qualified deployments.
Our commercial customers subsidize Fulcrum Community deployments by contributing to recurring revenue, which funds ongoing product development, hosting infrastructure, and our support team. This financial support ensures the sustainability and growth of the Fulcrum Community program.
It’s built on a cloud-based infrastructure with nothing to install, configure, or maintain.
Many free and open-source products require a high level of technical expertise to set up and run. Users must configure various components and manage the hosting and deployment of these tools. In contrast, Fulcrum’s infrastructure is always available, and its mobile apps are easily downloadable from app stores.
We designed our mobile apps specifically to capture data in offline environments and sync to the cloud when network connectivity becomes available.
The mobile landscape is rapidly changing and apps need continual attention to keep up with operating system updates, design pattern trends, and security concerns. The Fulcrum Android and iOS mobile apps are battle tested daily, with a global user community relying on them to work around the clock and in a variety of challenging environments.
Built-in tools for sharing both app templates and data feeds.
Our App Gallery simplifies sharing standard forms with the entire Fulcrum user base, allowing everyone to collect compatible data, even if they aren’t part of your Community organization. Once the data reaches the Fulcrum server, you can make it available to external stakeholders in various open formats and modern protocols, including CSV, GeoJSON, KML, shapefile, and more.
Our Approach
Leveraging Fulcrum Community allowed us to focus completely on the key tasks outlined in meeting the challenge objectives:
- Design a data collection form to capture address data in the National Address Database (NAD) Schema.
- Make it easy to import existing NAD data for reference in the field and on the ground during an event.
- Reference existing resources, including NAIP imagery, the US National Grid, building and parcel footprints, etc.
The U.S. Department of Transportation, in recognizing the need for accurate and up-to-date addresses, developed the National Address Database (NAD), which includes a data schema, defining all attribute fields and domains, as well as a downloadable extract of the current address database. To date, USDOT has received address data from 22 state partners and has transformed approximately 45.5 million address points into the NAD schema.
Building the data collection form
Using the NAD Schema as a blueprint, it was easy to visually build out the form with matching field names, standard choice list values, and appropriate visibility and requirement conditions.
Importing existing address data
One of the biggest challenges we faced was working with the existing NAD extract. All 45.5 million address points are loaded into an ESRI File Geodatabase available for download. Working with this massive file is nearly impossible, but we were able to use FME to extract a subset of the records for ZIP Code 20746 (Suitland, MD) and we exported these ~7k records into a CSV file for import into our Fulcrum app.
Integrating other resources
The NAD specification includes a field that provides the U.S. National Grid (USNG) coordinates for each address. The USNG, a nationally consistent grid-based reference system, increases the interoperability of location services with printed map products. We were able to calculate the USNG coordinates in the data collection form by integrating an open source JavaScript library using Fulcrum Data Events.
We also added USDA NAIP Imagery and USNG Grids as custom layers to provide additional context in the field.
TOP Demo Day
We joined numerous other technology providers, including IBM, Microsoft, and TomTom, in presenting our results during Demo Day at the Census Bureau headquarters in Suitland, MD. The digital tools created for The Opportunity Project range from websites and mobile apps to video games and communication tools that tackle a number of challenges in addition to address data collection, including disaster response, connecting veterans to jobs, student access to STEM fields, addressing the opioid crisis, and more.
Takeaways
Government innovation programs now emphasize collaboration with the technology industry to solve real challenges. Engaging stakeholders early, especially in disaster response, remains one of the toughest parts. However, determining who will maintain these projects after the initial sprint and Demo Day also raises concern. Leveraging a customizable and rapidly deployable SaaS platform like Fulcrum lets stakeholders focus on their work, free from software development, deployment, or maintenance worries.
Our NAD Address data collection app is available now on the Fulcrum App Gallery. You can add it to your own Fulcrum organization or use it to contribute data during an active Fulcrum Community deployment. If you are interested in learning more about Fulcrum Community, or any of our other humanitarian assistance and disaster response initiatives, please contact us!