Skip to content

August 2024 Program Status Update

Monthly Highlight: Priority Project Matrix

Allmaps.

This year, the BTAA-GIN has adopted a new Priority Projects model to streamline our work and focus on the most impactful goals. We began by collecting 17 project suggestions, which we prioritized using a matrix that considered factors such as project ownership, volunteer availability, DEIA relevance, time commitment, and difficulty. This matrix, inspired by the Minnesota Geospatial Advisory Council's workflows, helped us assess each project's likelihood of success. We then had team members vote on the importance of each project, creating a value score. By multiplying the likelihood of success by the value score, we categorized the projects into five high priority, six medium, and six low priority. Each committee has been assigned multiple projects, with some tasks designated for dedicated workgroups and others for individuals, including the Product Manager and a new hire.


The projects, along with their priority, owner, and status, are publicly available on our GitHub project board.

Program Activities

Program Management

  • Program Team meeting featured Lightning Talk "Ephemeral Geospatial Data: An Impending Digital Dark Age" related to a forthcoming article.
  • Conducting interviews for new Program and Outreach Coordinator position.
  • New graduate student research assistant for metadata processing hired and began orientation.

Committees and Workgroups

  • Working on Geoportal footer links
  • Held meeting with Community Engagement co-chairs to determine shared priorities
  • Reviewed Geodata Pilot progress and scope
  • Planned Program Team meeting topics
  • Implemented a staging area using Box
  • Added several test datasets to dev Geoportal
  • Held kickoff meeting
  • Analyzing the collection of map records for current adherence to a thesaurus.

BTAA Geoportal

Analytics Statistics

August 2024 by the numbers

  • Visitors: 8,280
  • Visits: 8,824
  • Downloads: 160
  • Visits with download: 1.81%
  • Outlinks: 988
  • Visits with outlink: 11.20%
  • Num. searches: 844
  • Search keywords: 294
  • Pageviews: 31,187

Unique visitors by month

More stats

See full statistics on our Analytics Dashboard

Top 10 Internal Searches

  1. ganborn
  2. geology
  3. lake superior
  4. university buildings
  5. europe map
  6. rainbow trout
  7. yemen
  8. striped bass
  9. greece
  10. york county, pennsylvania


Collections

Total records as of September 1, 2024: 98,560

Records September 1 2024
BTAA Geoportal Records from 2016 to September 1, 2024

August Harvesting Activities

Title Records added Records retired
Illinois Geospatial Data Clearinghouse 02a-01 Q3 2024 0 0
MN GeoCommons 05a-01 August 2024 1 0
PASDA 08a-01 Q3 2024 21 0
Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center Open Data 08f-01 Q3 2024 0 0
2024-08-06 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 183 59
2024-08-13 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 122 113
2024-08-20 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 98 36
2024-08-27 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 64 54
Humanitarian Data Exchange 99-1400 reharvest Q3 2024 463 0
Add Ohio parcels 1 0
Harvest Olmsted County, MN 05b-27109 10 0

Development

  • Development in August primarily revolved around the GeoBlacklight Summer Community Sprint, which focused on upgrading backend frameworks in anticipation of releasing a new major version (5.0).

  • Excessive bot/AI web scraping traffic crashed our development Geoportal and UMN Web Development had to spend extra time to block the crawlers.

Next Steps

Projects that are currently in progress or up next include:

  • Create or update policies and disclaimers for the Geoportal
  • Continue the Geodata Pilot
  • Kickoff three new workgroups: implementing FAST subjects; Scalable Approaches; Service Models

Refer to our Priority Projects board for more details.