Issued by:
Laura L. Hunt, 414-229-6447; llhunt@uwm.edu
MILWAUKEE – Anyone who has consulted Mapquest on the Internet or played the computer game “Sim City” is using what is known to urban planners and geographers as Geographic Information Systems (GIS). And, although it’s been around for many years, GIS applications – tools once reserved for professionals – are now coming into the consumer consciousness.
“GIS is going into the mainstream,” says Zhong-Ren Peng, UWM associate professor of urban planning. “Many people are using it, although they might not know that they are.”
The new path-finding capabilities in cars are an example of how the new technology has crept into everyday life, says Peng, who also is director of the multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Spatial Information Research (CASIR) at UWM.
GIS is a set of tools that allows many groups of unrelated spatial information to be plotted on a map, giving users a method of seeing where things are in relation to one another. Its applications also provide a method of analyzing patterns and tracking changes over time.
“The power of GIS is that it can tell you about the word ‘near’ in a quantitative way,” says William Huxhold, UWM professor of urban planning who is an internationally recognized expert in GIS. “It tells you what’s near and then makes sense of that.”
Formed a year ago, CASIR was established by Peng after he discovered how many projects on campus relied on spatial information.
“GIS was the foundation for many projects across the campus, but there was not a mechanism for doing collaborative research in this area,” says Peng.
Though housed in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning and the College of Letters and Science, CASIR incorporates faculty and student research in departments across campus – geography, computer science, engineering, environmental science, mathematics, information science and economics.
In fact, perhaps no other area of collaborative research brings so many disparate fields to the table.
That’s because its uses are growing astronomically – from transportation modeling, monitoring of environmental changes, and analyzing crime patterns.
Huxhold has used GIS to assess neighborhood improvements in Milwaukee and also to monitor housing conditions as indicators of neighborhood quality worldwide. A map of one Milwaukee neighborhood offers an at-a-glance view of multiple variables such as which properties are owned by an absentee landlord, where investment has been made in the past, and where the taxes are delinquent. It even shows the density of liquor stores in the area.
When trying to rejuvenate an area, it’s one thing to read statistics, but it’s another matter to see a picture that is detailed enough to show individual properties.
“This map is telling us the private sector isn’t investing close to the neighborhood targeted for improvement,” he says, pointing to color-coded spots that show little commercial development.
As MIS director for the city of Milwaukee in 1975, Huxhold established and directed the nation’s first computer graphics-based GIS for a municipality. When he joined the faculty in 1988, UWM became one of the first universities to teach GIS.
Other facets of GIS are related to simply finding a better way to get from one place to another.
Peng’s research is centered on access of real-time spatial information by way of the World Wide Web and wireless communications.
One of his projects at CASIR includes creation of traveler’s “trip planning” kiosks that will be functional at Mitchell International Airports next year.
The kiosks, which will be the only ones of their kind in the world, will give travelers who have never been here a way to navigate around Milwaukee in the quickest, simplest way. For example, they can get directions, avoid traffic, or determine the cheapest mode of transportation to their next destination – all at a touch of the screen.
Another of his projects involves putting data collected from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) on the Internet, something that could make traffic reports collected by people in helicopters a thing of the past.
“We are integrating this information from the UAVs and making it available online for use in real-time traffic information,” he says.
The larger the body of place-based data becomes, the more potential exists to use GIS technology in new ways, says Huxhold.
“Planners need data, and so do a lot of other people,” he says. “The limitation right now is whether the right data is available. Once you have it, you still have to accurately answer the question, ‘Where?’”
