Finally, HUD’s public includes highly sophisticated users with significant resources and users with far fewer resources. Additional training is necessary to bring resources to less sophisticated and resource-poor users. Many of the institutions, groups, and individuals who should be part of discussions about housing and urban issues lack access to technology and training to fully utilize GIS. Community organizations, neighborhood residents, and even HUD field office staff require both technical training and products that are easy to access and use.

Many of the tasks involved in disseminating and using data to analyze urban conditions are best done locally. Regional or metropolitan centers can work collaboratively with communities to inform research questions and agendas and to collect and present data in ways that are useful to the community. These centers and others, such as State Census Data Centers, can serve as regional or metropolitan points to gather data across time periods, negotiate partnerships with other data producers, clean data, and disseminate it. A number of Community Outreach Partnership Centers (COPCs) have begun this work.

Taking advantage of Environmental Systems Research Institute’s (ESRI’s) Arc Internet Map Server (ArcIMS), a product that allows for the development of interactive-mapping web sites, a number of COPCs have developed web sites for the community and city in which they work. Communities produce maps to meet neighborhood needs. Researchers post commonly used data such as U.S. Census data along with a variety of boundaries such as political jurisdictions or census geography, and users can create their own maps. Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles (NKLA), developed by graduate students at University of California at Los Angeles’s COPC,⁵ is one of the more sophisticated sites. The site allows users to post their own data and projects, and use data posted by the university. Users can also post the results and descriptions of the projects for which they have used data, in the process building a library of examples to generate future ideas.

These COPC web sites are what are known as “thin” GIS sites. They provide data for mapping or visualization directly on the site. They do not necessarily encourage more sophisticated analysis that would include analysis of problems at multiple scales or downloading data for multivariate analysis. HUD’s COPC program is structured to emphasize outreach rather than

Front Matter (R1-R14)

Executive Summary (1-16)

1. Introduction (17-28)

2. Ensuring the Availability, Accuracy, and Relevance of Urban and Housing Data (29-50)

3. Data Disseminaton and Software Tools (51-68)

4. Research and Policy Development (69-92)

5. The Role of Partnerships (93-106)

References (107-112)

Appendix A: Biographical Sketches of Committee Members (113-118)

Appendix B: Workshop Agenda (119-122)

Appendix C: Other Contributors (123-126)

Appendix D: Acronym List (127-128)