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Blue Raster helps you tell your story through interactive
mapping technology. Make your message clear, exciting,
and user-friendly for both mobile and web platforms.

Tag: Amazon EC2

Building a Prototype for FDA Food Data

Posted on by Christina Nordling

In response to 18F’s challenge to build a next generation application using the openFDA API, Blue Raster developed the openFDA Enforcement Mapper. Our goal was to create a map-based dashboard showcasing food recalls across the United States. You can visually see how recalls affected different regions.  Here is a first look at how we built this rapid prototype.

2015-07-07

Another Blue Raster solution for Open Data Enterprise along with the Tracing Global Foods story map inspired the visual design. In the spirit of the challenge, five team members rapidly prototyped the application using Node.js and the latest HTML5/Javascript. The visualization pulls data from the openFDA API, gecodes food recalls by location and maps the impact across the United States.

The team carefully combined multiple technologies to power the app:

  1. Source code pre-processing: Babel, Jade and Stylus
  2. JavaScript ES6 & 7
  3. Amazon Web Services / EC2
  4. Node.js / Express
  5. Data Visualization: Chart.js
  6. React
  7. Flux
  8. Container: Docker
  9. Map interface: ArcGIS JavaScript API
  10. Jenkins

For full project documentation and code, visit our GitHub at github.com/blueraster/open-fda-map-viewer.
openFDA Enforcement Mapper

REL EdMaps Helps Analyze School Data in the Midwest

Posted on by Adrienne Allegretti

How has poverty changed in the Midwest region since 2000? This question as well as others related to education priorities in the Midwest can be answered with the REL Midwest’s newly launched EdMaps.

EdMaps is a mapping application that displays educational data as “story maps” with the focus of building knowledge across the REL’s four educational priority areas. Built by Blue Raster, EdMaps helps users analyze publicly available school- and district-level data, observe trends over time and frame conversations on practice and policy.

REL Midwest EdMaps

In its initial debut, EdMaps includes story maps on graduation rates and poverty levels and future releases of the application will allow a choice of data to overlay and compare over time.

Matt Burke, project leader, says:

We believe that education stakeholders throughout our region will benefit greatly from being able to identify and compare particular schools, districts, and states, observe trends over time and demographic shifts, and create custom data displays from a wide variety of publicly available data. We hope that EdMaps will serve as a useful tool to help frame conversations on practice and policy, and the development of this tool would not have been possible without the knowledgeable and skillful staff at Blue Raster.

The data is delivered by ArcGIS for Server deployed in the Amazon Cloud and uses the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. School District data trends are leveraging with the Dojo Toolkit and HighCharts API.

To view the application, visit http://www.relmidwest.org/edmaps.

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