Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources Open Data

Last year, some of my colleagues and I in Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources (PRCR) began work on updating our parks and greenway trails data. We fixed typos, cleaned up some inconsistencies, and did our best to ensure that our data reflected our department’s actual inventory of park properties and greenway trails. However, during this process we discovered several datasets named some variation of "Parks" and "Greenway Trails". All differed in minor ways and none matched what we had come up with for our update. Simply updating our data was not enough.

Over the past few months I've had the pleasure of working with the City's Enterprise GIS and Enterprise Data Anlaytics groups to address how both staff and the public access the department's authoritative spatial data. In that time we’ve been developing and instituting changes in workflows, data storage, and best practices to ensure staff and the public are working from the same data. The latest updates to Raleigh Parks and Raleigh Greenway Trails are the culmination of this initial effort.

If you've used the parks and greenways datasets in the past, there are two major changes to be aware of. First, we've fully moved our parks and greenways data to ArcGIS Online. In the past, you could access these dastasets via ArcGIS Online, but at the end of the day, they were served from a City or Raleigh server. Now the data are served from ArcGIS Online's cloud service platform. As a result, there are new endpoints for accessing the data via the GeoService and GeoJSON APIs. If you have an application that pulls parks or greenway trails via these APIs, you'll want to make sure you update the endpoint.

Second, Greenway Trails and Greenway Structures have been consolidated into a single dataset: Raleigh Greenway Trails. These had previously been separated to accommodate needs specific to the City’s asset management software. That need for separation hasn't changed, but it no longer drives how our greenway trails data is made available to staff or the public. By taking advantage of hosted feature layer views in ArcGIS Online we can tailor the same data to accommodate a wider variety of needs. If you've been using the Greenway Trails and Greenway Structures datasets in your application, you'll only need to use the Raleigh Greenway Trails dataset moving forward.

With this major update comes a renewed sense of possibility about how these data might be used. I've put together a few simple examples showing how the Raleigh Parks and Raleigh Greenway Trails datasets might be integrated into a data analysis or visualization project. These examples represent starting points. I can't wait to see what you all come up with!

Examples

Greenway Elevation Profiler

This example enables users to create interactive elevation profiles of segments from the Raleigh Greenway Trails. This is a no-code application based on ArcGIS Online’s Elevation Profile web app template. Create an ArcGIS for Developers account to get started adding Raleigh Open Data to maps and apps.

·         Live app

·         Animated GIF example

Greenway Buffer Analysis

What areas are within 1 mile of a greenway trail? Using the esri-leaflet JavaScript library to access Raleigh Greenway Trails and passing the data through a few of TurfJS’s spatial analysis functions, we can determine what areas are within 1 mile of a Raleigh Greenway and what areas are not.

·         App & Code

·         Static image

Embed Code

See the Pen Raleigh Greenways, 1 Mile Buffer by RaleighPRCR (@RaleighPRCR) on CodePen.

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Park Development Status

This example relies on the ArcGIS for JavaScript API 4.x and Raleigh Parks dataset to generate an interactive thematic map focused on the development status of properties in PRCR’s inventory.

·         App & Code

·         Animated GIF example

Embed Code

See the Pen Developed & Undeveloped Parks by RaleighPRCR (@RaleighPRCR) on CodePen.

Nearest Park Analysis

This example relies on two datasets from the Raleigh Open Data site: Raleigh Parks and Planning Jurisdictions. The latter is made available on Raleigh Open Data by Wake County. Behind the scenes, this example uses the extent of Raleigh’s planning jurisdiction and TurfJS to create a grid of .25x.25 mile squares. For each of those squares TurfJS calculates the distance to center of the nearest park. While this analysis draws on two datasets available via Raleigh Open Data, the result is an entirely new dataset.

·         App & Code

·         Animate GIF example

Embed Code

"See the Pen Straight-line Distance to Center of Nearest Developed Raleigh Park by RaleighPRCR (@RaleighPRCR) on CodePen."

Written by: Ryan Cooper