Philadelphia Data Resources

The following online sources have proved useful in retrieving spatial data for the Philadelphia area:

• http://www.pasda.psu.edu/default.asp
• http://www2.census.gov/cgi-bin/shapefiles/state-files?state=42
• http://citymaps.phila.gov/CrimeMap/MappingServices.asmx/GetCrimePtsByCriteria

I used the following curl command to pull geocoded incident data from the last link above:

curl -H 'Content-type:application/json' -H 'Accept:text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8' -c cookie 
-d '{"crimeclass":"10","from":'$s',"to":'$e',"maxBounds":"2568448,138838,2850283,362526","curExtentArea":19468800000}' 
http://citymaps.phila.gov/CrimeMap/MappingServices.asmx/GetCrimePtsByCriteria

I had to store a cookie in the file 'cookie' which I captured using Firebug.  Also, $s and $e are date variables specifying the start and end date for the query.

In a followup post, I will discuss how I am using PostgreSQL/PostGIS and Quantum GIS to view and transform the data found on the aforementioned sites into a format useful for analysis.