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Neighbourhood Information Systems
Dennis Culhane
Cartographic Modeling Laboratory
University of Pennsylvania
200 Caster Building, 3701 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6214
Phone: 215-349-8705, 215-746-3245
Fax: 215-573-3019
culhane@mail.med.upenn.edu
Bradley Breuer
Avencia, Incorporated
340 N 12th St, Suite 402B
Philadelphia, PA 19107
bradley@avencia.com
“Community information systems” are becoming an increasingly common way to distribute administrative data. These web-based systems are distributing valuable community and social indicator data to concerned individuals, social service organizations, community development professionals, policy analysts, planners, and businesses who would otherwise have great trouble accessing neighbourhood level data. Using the infrastructure provided by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and the World Wide Web, these systems provide important neighbourhood data via maps, tables and sometime through downloadable files. Some also provide analysis tools for users to manipulate or extract key neighbourhood indicator data. Such systems have become popular in some municipal agencies because they are less expensive and don’t require desktop GIS software and equipment, and specialized training (Hillier, McKelvey, Wernecke, Forthcoming).
GIS is a way of thinking about the world that puts spatial relationships at the center. GIS technology was originally developed to model the natural world—landmasses and bodies of water, elevation, temperature, soil composition, and suitable habitats for animals. More recently, social scientists have begun applying these tools—and this way of thinking—to understanding the social and built environment. These technologies form the core of the offerings available in online community information systems.
Among a variety of offerings, these systems typically have census data, city administrative data, economic and social indicator data, and important housing and poverty indicators. Of course, with the use of the Internet, these systems have significantly increased access to data. Similarly, providing these data with a geographic interface and analysis tools has allowed end-users to access and analyze data in ways previously unavailable to them because of technical barriers. Community information systems have added to the richness of information that is available to community organizers, social workers, and community organizations and it has been especially helpful to those engaged in neighbourhood development. New audiences for these data, including commercial entities, continue to emerge as data and tools expand. As users and uses of these online systems grow, critical questions about their reliability and robustness must be answered.
NEIGHBOURHOOD INFORMATION SYSTEM (NIS)
The Neighbourhood Information System (NIS) was developed by the Cartographic Modeling Lab (CML) at the University of Pennsylvania. The CML is an interdisciplinary research center that applies GIS and spatial analysis to social policy analysis, teaching, and research with a special focus on Philadelphia. Principal investigators from across the University of Pennsylvania have access to the lab’s hardware, software, and data warehouse investments as well as methodological expertise. The CML is funded primarily through research grants from foundations and public institutions, and by contracts for services and application development. The NIS is just one of several successful city-university partnerships designed to distribute administrative data in a user-friendly and Internet-based interface. Other such partnerships include community information systems at the Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland Area Network for Data and Organizing), New York University (New York City Housing and Information System), and the University of California (Neighbourhood Knowledge Los Angeles). Much of the technical programming behind the NIS is done by Avencia, Incorporated, a Philadelphia-based GIS software development firm.
The NIS provides data for the city of Philadelphia, which is coterminous with Philadelphia County. Users can access the system at http://www.cml.upenn.edu/nis. Technical requirements for using the system are kept to a minimum; most users only need an Internet browser such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (7.0 or higher) or Netscape’s Internet Navigator and a connection to the Internet. Given the widespread availability of the Internet in homes, schools, workplaces, and libraries, a vast majority of Philadelphians have access to the Neighbourhood Information System. Outreach and training are used to promote the use of the system.
The NIS is comprised of five applications: the parcelBase website (address-level housing data), the neighbourhoodBase website (aggregate housing and demographic data), muralBase (information on the 2,000 murals in Philadelphia), crimeBase (5 years of crime data), and Philly Site Finder (an inventory of vacant and underutilized commercial and industrial sites in several Philadelphia neighbourhoods). NIS users can research individual properties; run queries to locate comparables; plan, site and evaluate housing development programmes; and study neighbourhood conditions with user-defined maps, charts and reports. The integrated database also supports academic research on housing, social indicators, public health, school achievement and environmental science. Applications under development include schoolBase a utility for distributing information about schools and children, and a social service locator system.
ParcelBase
ParcelBase was the first of the applications developed by the CML and gives users access to address level data. ParcelBase is a data warehouse that integrates data on over 500,000 parcels, or properties. Users can access data on any parcel in Philadelphia by typing an address. In most cases, the address entered can be interpreted by the master address table, which tries to account for common misspellings and abbreviations and users are provided with information on the property that includes its ownership, sales listing, utility and tax information, basic property description, vacancy indicators, and fire history.
In addition to this standard information, the ParcelBase provides foot survey information and photographs collected by community groups for and uploaded by the CML. In addition to the traditional sources of administrative data, the NIS utilizes several spatial data sources. Spatial data are electronic files that tell cartographers the location of properties, parks, streets, and other components of the built environment. These data elements highlight that well maintained spatial data like streets and parcel maps are critical to the mapping component of the online application. The agency attribute data from municipal agencies are updated on a quarterly basis; census data are updated every ten years, and spatial data are updated when new map layers become available.
NeighbourhoodBase
NeighbourhoodBase gives users access to many of the same data elements in pacelBase, but the data are presented at various aggregate levels rather than at the individual address level. NeighbourhoodBase has much more census data that is more user-friendly than the Census Bureau’s download website. The online mapping, reporting and data analysis tools in NeighbourhoodBase can be used to focus on a specific council district, elementary school feeder area, neighbourhood, zip code, census tract or block group. Users can draw comparisons between individual neighbourhoods or compare local conditions to the city as a whole. Drawing upon physical, demographic and real property data, neighbourhoodBase users have a planning tool that greatly enhances their ability to start new programmes, manage resources and target interventions. NeighbourhoodBase is publicly accessible and can be used by anyone with an Internet connection and Internet browser.
MuralBase
MuralBase is an interactive database and website showcasing hundreds of murals produced by Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Programme since 1990. Visitors to the muralBase website can search for murals by theme, artist’s name, zipcode or year As well as through a map interface similar to the other NIS applications. The community mural projects are significant both as public art and as neighbourhood redevelopment initiatives. Over 2000 murals have been painted on the sides of buildings that serve as canvases for public art in Philadelphia. Having thoroughly documented vacancy and abandonment in Philadelphia through the other NIS applications, muralBase is an effort to document the positive redevelopment that is occurring in Philadelphia. It is also an effort to provide virtual access to a wide range of community art installations. MuralBase is publicly accessible and can be used by anyone with an Internet connection and Internet browser.
CrimeBase
CrimeBase, released in April 2004, is a publicly accessible application that provides online mapping, reporting and data analysis tools for crime data from the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) in a similar form to NeighbourhoodBase. Users can create tables, maps, charts, queries, summary statistics, or trends and can create their own geographic boundaries by defining a neighbourhood and producing aggregated statistics for that area. Users can download much of the data for free.
PhillySiteFinder
PhillySiteFinder, released in July 2004, is a publicly-accessible, web-based mapping application developed in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Environmental Council (PEC), the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission and the City of Philadelphia Commerce Department. The application is designed to provide potential investors with information on an inventory of vacant and underutilized commercial and industrial sites in the Kensington, Richmond, Bridesburg and Fishtown neighbourhoods of Philadelphia. Users can search for parcels and uncover details including size, past sales, property assessment information, data from the Environmental Protection Agency, photographs, and zoning classification.
Technological advances
Community information systems utilizing GIS and providing data on the Internet are a relatively new phenomenon. For this reason, innovation and technological advances constantly change how users interface with the online system. This section describes new technology that has been incorporated into the Neighbourhood Information System and other community information systems. How and why new technology is incorporated into the online system and how these new technologies are changing the way end-users interact with online community information systems are discussed.
NeighbourhoodBase provides users with data aggregations at various geographic levels like neighbourhood, zip code and census tracts. These arbitrary geographic divisions sometimes prove challenging for users to interpret given that each organization determines its neighbourhood or study area differently. In other words, not every group will agree on the boundaries of a neighbourhood, nor will they necessarily find the NIS’s geographic demarcations useful. Given the limitations and overwhelming demand from users, the Neighbourhood Information System recently began implementing the user-defined neighbourhood function. This tool literally gives users the ability to zoom into a particular area of Philadelphia and draw the boundaries of their neighbourhood on a map. Once the user has outlined their neighbourhood on the interactive map, they are given a custom data aggregation for this user-defined geographic area. Where users previously had to approximate their neighbourhood based on a NIS name scheme and geographic division, users can now create their own geographic divisions and data aggregations.
This new tool is a very powerful way of placing more control in the hands of the users and giving them greater control over how geography is defined for the purpose of data aggregation. However, this new technology has some limitations. Users must define neighbourhoods in terms of the smallest NIS geography (census block group). Because administrative data is often not disclosed at a geographic level smaller than this arbitrary census designation, users are required to use it as a building block to create user-defined neighbourhoods. Furthermore, the technology requires very precise navigation of an interactive map. Users are required to zoom into a certain area of the city and use the city streets to pick the area they seek to define as their user-defined neighbourhood. Early experience with users has shown that this technology will be advantageous to organizations and individuals seeking more precise neighbourhood-level data. It has also shown that training is a key method for teaching users how this new technology works.
The ability to extract data from the Neighbourhood Information System and use it in statistical software or tables in reports has been sought by users for some time. To meet this need, which has been primarily demanded from a group of advanced users, the NIS recently developed the export data function. Once a user has created a table of multiple data elements, they can click on the export it shortcut tool and choose to download the data into a common database application like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access. Previously users could only view data on a webpage while browsing the Internet. Now, data can be extracted and used without the Internet or NIS online interface. Many users have taken advantage of this option to remove data and analyze it in their own GIS or statistical software applications. To facilitate this process the Neighbourhood Information System has also begun disclosing shapefiles for download. Shapefiles are electronic maps that are required to use any data in a GIS desktop software application. By giving users the ability to download data, the Neighbourhood Information has made a significant step from simply being an online data intermediary to being a data clearing house where users can both utilize the NIS’s online functionality and they can extract data from the Internet to use in their own analysis.
Data in the NIS is unique because it is geographically related, but also because it gives users a snapshot of how things have changed over time. Since 1997 the NIS has been collecting data from various city of Philadelphia agencies. In 2004, the NIS began to implement a trending capability in the Neighbourhood Information System. Given five years of data since its inception, the NIS interface was upgraded to allow users to see how specific data elements have changed over time. By providing users with trend data, the NIS is allowing organizations, individuals, and agencies to measure the effectiveness of interventions. It also helps users plan for future programming and interventions. Furthermore, the NIS is a very rich archive of City of Philadelphia administrative data. For example, the United States Post Office, from which the NIS draws information about which addresses are vacant, destroys their data after only a few months. The NIS archives this data and allows users the ability to trace back in time to see how vacancy patterns have changed.
CONCLUSION
Though this article has not directly addressed community information systems in the Middle East, the applicability to this region of the world is very relevant. While from country to country data sources, both spatial and administrative, vary, the need to have geographically relevant data and data browsers is critical. The implementation of a GIS web-based system should follow many of the steps outlined here and address many of the concerns outlined in this article.
References
Neighbourhood Information Systems
Dennis Culhane
Cartographic Modeling Laboratory
University of Pennsylvania
200 Caster Building, 3701 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6214
Phone: 215-349-8705, 215-746-3245
Fax: 215-573-3019
culhane@mail.med.upenn.edu
Bradley Breuer
Avencia, Incorporated
340 N 12th St, Suite 402B
Philadelphia, PA 19107
bradley@avencia.com
“Community information systems” are becoming an increasingly common way to distribute administrative data. These web-based systems are distributing valuable community and social indicator data to concerned individuals, social service organizations, community development professionals, policy analysts, planners, and businesses who would otherwise have great trouble accessing neighbourhood level data. Using the infrastructure provided by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and the World Wide Web, these systems provide important neighbourhood data via maps, tables and sometime through downloadable files. Some also provide analysis tools for users to manipulate or extract key neighbourhood indicator data. Such systems have become popular in some municipal agencies because they are less expensive and don’t require desktop GIS software and equipment, and specialized training (Hillier, McKelvey, Wernecke, Forthcoming).
GIS is a way of thinking about the world that puts spatial relationships at the center. GIS technology was originally developed to model the natural world—landmasses and bodies of water, elevation, temperature, soil composition, and suitable habitats for animals. More recently, social scientists have begun applying these tools—and this way of thinking—to understanding the social and built environment. These technologies form the core of the offerings available in online community information systems.
Among a variety of offerings, these systems typically have census data, city administrative data, economic and social indicator data, and important housing and poverty indicators. Of course, with the use of the Internet, these systems have significantly increased access to data. Similarly, providing these data with a geographic interface and analysis tools has allowed end-users to access and analyze data in ways previously unavailable to them because of technical barriers. Community information systems have added to the richness of information that is available to community organizers, social workers, and community organizations and it has been especially helpful to those engaged in neighbourhood development. New audiences for these data, including commercial entities, continue to emerge as data and tools expand. As users and uses of these online systems grow, critical questions about their reliability and robustness must be answered.
NEIGHBOURHOOD INFORMATION SYSTEM (NIS)
The Neighbourhood Information System (NIS) was developed by the Cartographic Modeling Lab (CML) at the University of Pennsylvania. The CML is an interdisciplinary research center that applies GIS and spatial analysis to social policy analysis, teaching, and research with a special focus on Philadelphia. Principal investigators from across the University of Pennsylvania have access to the lab’s hardware, software, and data warehouse investments as well as methodological expertise. The CML is funded primarily through research grants from foundations and public institutions, and by contracts for services and application development. The NIS is just one of several successful city-university partnerships designed to distribute administrative data in a user-friendly and Internet-based interface. Other such partnerships include community information systems at the Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland Area Network for Data and Organizing), New York University (New York City Housing and Information System), and the University of California (Neighbourhood Knowledge Los Angeles). Much of the technical programming behind the NIS is done by Avencia, Incorporated, a Philadelphia-based GIS software development firm.
The NIS provides data for the city of Philadelphia, which is coterminous with Philadelphia County. Users can access the system at http://www.cml.upenn.edu/nis. Technical requirements for using the system are kept to a minimum; most users only need an Internet browser such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (7.0 or higher) or Netscape’s Internet Navigator and a connection to the Internet. Given the widespread availability of the Internet in homes, schools, workplaces, and libraries, a vast majority of Philadelphians have access to the Neighbourhood Information System. Outreach and training are used to promote the use of the system.
The NIS is comprised of five applications: the parcelBase website (address-level housing data), the neighbourhoodBase website (aggregate housing and demographic data), muralBase (information on the 2,000 murals in Philadelphia), crimeBase (5 years of crime data), and Philly Site Finder (an inventory of vacant and underutilized commercial and industrial sites in several Philadelphia neighbourhoods). NIS users can research individual properties; run queries to locate comparables; plan, site and evaluate housing development programmes; and study neighbourhood conditions with user-defined maps, charts and reports. The integrated database also supports academic research on housing, social indicators, public health, school achievement and environmental science. Applications under development include schoolBase a utility for distributing information about schools and children, and a social service locator system.
ParcelBase
ParcelBase was the first of the applications developed by the CML and gives users access to address level data. ParcelBase is a data warehouse that integrates data on over 500,000 parcels, or properties. Users can access data on any parcel in Philadelphia by typing an address. In most cases, the address entered can be interpreted by the master address table, which tries to account for common misspellings and abbreviations and users are provided with information on the property that includes its ownership, sales listing, utility and tax information, basic property description, vacancy indicators, and fire history.
In addition to this standard information, the ParcelBase provides foot survey information and photographs collected by community groups for and uploaded by the CML. In addition to the traditional sources of administrative data, the NIS utilizes several spatial data sources. Spatial data are electronic files that tell cartographers the location of properties, parks, streets, and other components of the built environment. These data elements highlight that well maintained spatial data like streets and parcel maps are critical to the mapping component of the online application. The agency attribute data from municipal agencies are updated on a quarterly basis; census data are updated every ten years, and spatial data are updated when new map layers become available.
NeighbourhoodBase
NeighbourhoodBase gives users access to many of the same data elements in pacelBase, but the data are presented at various aggregate levels rather than at the individual address level. NeighbourhoodBase has much more census data that is more user-friendly than the Census Bureau’s download website. The online mapping, reporting and data analysis tools in NeighbourhoodBase can be used to focus on a specific council district, elementary school feeder area, neighbourhood, zip code, census tract or block group. Users can draw comparisons between individual neighbourhoods or compare local conditions to the city as a whole. Drawing upon physical, demographic and real property data, neighbourhoodBase users have a planning tool that greatly enhances their ability to start new programmes, manage resources and target interventions. NeighbourhoodBase is publicly accessible and can be used by anyone with an Internet connection and Internet browser.
MuralBase
MuralBase is an interactive database and website showcasing hundreds of murals produced by Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Programme since 1990. Visitors to the muralBase website can search for murals by theme, artist’s name, zipcode or year As well as through a map interface similar to the other NIS applications. The community mural projects are significant both as public art and as neighbourhood redevelopment initiatives. Over 2000 murals have been painted on the sides of buildings that serve as canvases for public art in Philadelphia. Having thoroughly documented vacancy and abandonment in Philadelphia through the other NIS applications, muralBase is an effort to document the positive redevelopment that is occurring in Philadelphia. It is also an effort to provide virtual access to a wide range of community art installations. MuralBase is publicly accessible and can be used by anyone with an Internet connection and Internet browser.
CrimeBase
CrimeBase, released in April 2004, is a publicly accessible application that provides online mapping, reporting and data analysis tools for crime data from the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) in a similar form to NeighbourhoodBase. Users can create tables, maps, charts, queries, summary statistics, or trends and can create their own geographic boundaries by defining a neighbourhood and producing aggregated statistics for that area. Users can download much of the data for free.
PhillySiteFinder
PhillySiteFinder, released in July 2004, is a publicly-accessible, web-based mapping application developed in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Environmental Council (PEC), the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission and the City of Philadelphia Commerce Department. The application is designed to provide potential investors with information on an inventory of vacant and underutilized commercial and industrial sites in the Kensington, Richmond, Bridesburg and Fishtown neighbourhoods of Philadelphia. Users can search for parcels and uncover details including size, past sales, property assessment information, data from the Environmental Protection Agency, photographs, and zoning classification.
Technological advances
Community information systems utilizing GIS and providing data on the Internet are a relatively new phenomenon. For this reason, innovation and technological advances constantly change how users interface with the online system. This section describes new technology that has been incorporated into the Neighbourhood Information System and other community information systems. How and why new technology is incorporated into the online system and how these new technologies are changing the way end-users interact with online community information systems are discussed.
NeighbourhoodBase provides users with data aggregations at various geographic levels like neighbourhood, zip code and census tracts. These arbitrary geographic divisions sometimes prove challenging for users to interpret given that each organization determines its neighbourhood or study area differently. In other words, not every group will agree on the boundaries of a neighbourhood, nor will they necessarily find the NIS’s geographic demarcations useful. Given the limitations and overwhelming demand from users, the Neighbourhood Information System recently began implementing the user-defined neighbourhood function. This tool literally gives users the ability to zoom into a particular area of Philadelphia and draw the boundaries of their neighbourhood on a map. Once the user has outlined their neighbourhood on the interactive map, they are given a custom data aggregation for this user-defined geographic area. Where users previously had to approximate their neighbourhood based on a NIS name scheme and geographic division, users can now create their own geographic divisions and data aggregations.
This new tool is a very powerful way of placing more control in the hands of the users and giving them greater control over how geography is defined for the purpose of data aggregation. However, this new technology has some limitations. Users must define neighbourhoods in terms of the smallest NIS geography (census block group). Because administrative data is often not disclosed at a geographic level smaller than this arbitrary census designation, users are required to use it as a building block to create user-defined neighbourhoods. Furthermore, the technology requires very precise navigation of an interactive map. Users are required to zoom into a certain area of the city and use the city streets to pick the area they seek to define as their user-defined neighbourhood. Early experience with users has shown that this technology will be advantageous to organizations and individuals seeking more precise neighbourhood-level data. It has also shown that training is a key method for teaching users how this new technology works.
The ability to extract data from the Neighbourhood Information System and use it in statistical software or tables in reports has been sought by users for some time. To meet this need, which has been primarily demanded from a group of advanced users, the NIS recently developed the export data function. Once a user has created a table of multiple data elements, they can click on the export it shortcut tool and choose to download the data into a common database application like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access. Previously users could only view data on a webpage while browsing the Internet. Now, data can be extracted and used without the Internet or NIS online interface. Many users have taken advantage of this option to remove data and analyze it in their own GIS or statistical software applications. To facilitate this process the Neighbourhood Information System has also begun disclosing shapefiles for download. Shapefiles are electronic maps that are required to use any data in a GIS desktop software application. By giving users the ability to download data, the Neighbourhood Information has made a significant step from simply being an online data intermediary to being a data clearing house where users can both utilize the NIS’s online functionality and they can extract data from the Internet to use in their own analysis.
Data in the NIS is unique because it is geographically related, but also because it gives users a snapshot of how things have changed over time. Since 1997 the NIS has been collecting data from various city of Philadelphia agencies. In 2004, the NIS began to implement a trending capability in the Neighbourhood Information System. Given five years of data since its inception, the NIS interface was upgraded to allow users to see how specific data elements have changed over time. By providing users with trend data, the NIS is allowing organizations, individuals, and agencies to measure the effectiveness of interventions. It also helps users plan for future programming and interventions. Furthermore, the NIS is a very rich archive of City of Philadelphia administrative data. For example, the United States Post Office, from which the NIS draws information about which addresses are vacant, destroys their data after only a few months. The NIS archives this data and allows users the ability to trace back in time to see how vacancy patterns have changed.
CONCLUSION
Though this article has not directly addressed community information systems in the Middle East, the applicability to this region of the world is very relevant. While from country to country data sources, both spatial and administrative, vary, the need to have geographically relevant data and data browsers is critical. The implementation of a GIS web-based system should follow many of the steps outlined here and address many of the concerns outlined in this article.
References
- Bailey, Terri J. Building Community Capacity to Use Information: A Framework. National Neighbourhood Indicators Partnership, The Urban Institute, October 1997.
- Cartographic Modeling Laboratory (2004). Philadelphia Neighbourhood Information System. Retrieved on October 15, 2004 from http://www.cml.upenn.edu/nis
- Case Western Reserve University, Urban Poverty Center (2004). Retrieved on October 15, 2004 from http://povertycenter.cwru.edu/
- Caulfield, Michelle. Incremental Power: The Nexus between Information Technologies and Community Development, Master’s Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, available at http://home.comcast.net/~mcml/FinalThesis.pdf.
- Chicago Neighbourhood Early Warning System (2004). Retrieved on October 15, 2004 from http://www.newschicago.org
- Hillier, Amy, Heather McKelvey, and Marilou Wernecke (forthcoming), Removing barriers to the use of community information systems. Journal of Community Practice.
- Hillier, Amy and Dennis Culhane (2004). Integrating and distributing administrative data to support community change, in Marie Weil, editor, Handbook of Community Practice. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
- Hillier, Amy, Culhane, D.P., Smith, T.E., and Tomin, C.D. (2003)/. Predicting housing abandonment with the Philadelphia Neighbourhood Information System. Journal of Urban Affairs, 25 (1), 91-105.
- Kingsley, Thomas (Ed.). Building and Operating Neighbourhood Indicator Systems. National Neighbourhood Indicators Partnership, The Urban Institute, March 1999.
- Kingsley, Thomas. Neighbourhood Indicators: Taking Advantages of the new potential. Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, 1998.
- Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Mapping for Change: Using Geographic Information Systems for Community Development, December 2002.
- Map Milwaukee. Retrieved on October 15, 2004 from http://www.milwaukee.gov/gis.
- Mardock, Lori. Predicting Early Housing Abandonment in Central: Creating an Early Warning System. Neighbourhood Planning for Community Revitalization, Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, March 1998.
- Neighbourhood Transformation Initiative, City of Philadelphia (2004). Retrieved on October 15, 2004 from http://www.phila.gov/nti/whatisnti.htm
- New York University, Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, New York City Housing and Neighbourhood Information System. Retrieved on October 15, 2004 from http://www.nychanis.com.
- Romer, D. Wacheter, S.M. and Wong S. (2002). Community information: The Need for a new generation of community statistical systems. Reported to the Fannie Mae Foundation.
- Sawicki, David S. and Flynn, Patrice (1996). Neighbourhood Indicators: a review of the literature and assessment of conceptual and methodological issues. Journal of the American Planning Association, 63(2), 165-183.
- Snow, Christopher, W., Kathryn L.S. Pettit, Margery Austin Turner. Neighbourhood Early Warning Systems: Four Cities’ Experience and Implications for the District of Columbia. Urban Institute, Housing and Communities Policy Center, March 2004.
- United States Census Bureau (2004). American Factfinder. Retrieved on October 15, 2004 from http://factfinder.census.gov.
- University of California, UCLA Advanced Policy Institute, (http://nkla.sppsr.ucla.edu).