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This describes a one stop research and analysis tool for which many of the parts already exist. This page needs to be revised to reflect Jeremy's e-mails on 6/29.....
Census data is a highly developed and widely used database. Some important dimensions are: data series, area definition, area boundaries & centroid expressed as lat/long. Google has given us a wonderful mapping facility and Bill has given us a splendid interface. When one buys census data on a CD/DVD, one gets software with it, but I found it not easy to use and not flexible. I can probably find a census DVD with several states on it for the most recent census. It would not have maps (boundaries). Census data is also available on line, I think the entire database.
We could write apl fns that could deliver census data given the following specifications:
- which of their 1000+ data series.
- defining georgraphy at what level (state, county, census tract, block group, block)
- locus of interest expressed as lat/long or street address
- geography with centroids within a specified distance
The data could come back as a matrix with geography down the side and data topics across the top. That matrix would lend itself to robust analysis.
I can think of lots of uses.
- market potential for a WalMart store at a given location.
- public planners need to know things, especially for transportation planning (TAZ means Transportation Analysis Zone)
- retail potentials or housing requirements for real estate developers
The range of ways we could display the data would be extraodinary and simply beautiful.
The database access project described above can provide the data needed to drive a retail gravity model.
Here's a webfolder which provides description of a retail gravity model.
Here's the arithmetic.
Here's the data.
Here's a graphic for presentation.
This project was done in Excel by Mel Levine.
This is a standard type of analysis done to understand the revenue potentials of a retail market.
It tells us how many square feet of retail space we should build.
Once we know that, we can develop a proposed real estate development project, especially a retail or mixed use project. The professional activities described in this e-mail would under normal circumstances be done by a dozen people each doing parts. We can automate the entire thing so it can be done from one workstation with glorious presentation. The result of this work would be to test the feasibility and financing viability of a $200 million development project, or lots of them.
One of the things that excites me in this part of my life is that computers are becoming so wonderfully powerful. This project idea would have been hard to accomplish when we were working with 32k workspaces and had no graphic interface.
