Happy GIS Day!

SEMCOG’s 2045 Regional Development Forecast Explorer map allows you to view SEMCOG’s detailed long-range forecast of population, households, and jobs for each county, and community, and traffic analysis zone in the seven county Southeast Michigan region.

This international celebration of geographic information systems (GIS) helps others learn about geography and the real-world application of GIS that are making a difference in our region and beyond.

To get in the spirit of GIS Day and show some of what can be done using GIS software, I am sharing some of SEMCOG’s most recent work with you.

A number of staff from SEMCOG’s Data Analysis Department led a workshop at SEMCOG’s General Assembly meeting on the topic of Data, Maps, and Apps. The session was interactive and a great opportunity to hear from local governments about what data they need and how they use the data we provide.

Here are a few of my key takeaways:

• Community Profiles is still the most popular application on our website.
  It provides a variety of datasets available for each community and the ability to create a custom profile by aggregating communities.
• The most popular interactive map is our Community Explorer.
  This application contains 35 unique datasets that can be viewed by census tract, community, and county geographies. Once you chose the geography and dataset you need, the charts and graphs on the right put that information in context within the county or the region.

• It was no surprise that 40 percent of attendees prefer to view our data in an interactive map format, as opposed to a report, static map, or a spreadsheet. We continue to create new and interesting maps, using a variety of mapping software. This allows us to come up with innovative ways to display our data, which then tells the story of our region.

If you visit the SEMCOG Map Gallery you can view all of our interactive maps.

The most popular maps include:

• Traffic Volume
• ParkFinder®
• Forecast Explorer
• Pavement Condition

If you are interested in acquiring the data we use to create these maps, visit the SEMCOG Open Data Portal, where you can preview the data, build your own map, or download the data.

We recently updated the data and maps webpage to make it easier to locate the most popular resources. From this page, it is easy to access many of the products mentioned above.

If you are interested in how GIS is being used throughout our region and state, there are a number of regular meetings where you can learn about this very topic. Our next Southeast Michigan GIS User Group meeting will be held on December 12 at SEMCOG’s offices. The agenda is located here and you can register to attend via our web calendar.

On behalf of SEMCOG, I wish you all a very happy GIS Day, and I hope you find some time to review the resources we have created using GIS.