Marynia Kolak Wins IL GIS Association's Web Mapping Competition

The Center for Spatial Data Science’s Research Specialist Marynia Kolak won the Illinois GIS Association’s Web Mapping Competition with her entry on the West Humboldt Park Community Resource Map. The map was developed as a collaboration between community organizations, a Chicago healthcare group, and a GIS student. 

The goal of the web application has been to develop and promote an easy-to access, open platform for sharing, mapping, and exploring community resource information. Community resource data from West Humboldt Park Development Council, Our Lady of Angels, and the Diabetes Link project from

Northwestern Memorial Hospital was integrated, cleaned, validated, and then made available as an open data service using Google Fusion Tables. Each community organization maintains their own dataset, and a customized workflow refreshes the master data stream. A light web application front-end application harvests that data in real-time, so any changes made to the data are updated in the web map on-the-fly. 

Community members and application users can search by category, address, distance from an address, name of organization, or type of service. They can also add or update data, and view the existing directory as a chart. The code for the web application, building from other open source projects, is likewise open and available for further improvement at Github. The project uses HTML/CSS, Javascript, the Google Maps API, Google Fusion Table API, Google Charts API, and Chainbuilder (an open source workflow tool).

Congratulations!

(Originally Published on 09-29-2016)