To understand the significance of this, it helps to know a little bit more about Frank and the GIS services at Baruch CUNY. Frank is Baruch’s GIS Librarian, he and his team have put in an amazing amount of work to collect and often immensely improve data released by NYC Planning and other public sources (you can read Frank’s blog at gothos.info). Frank’s documentation, which we’ve preserved, is impeccable and truly demonstrates the value of his efforts to preserve public data and make it more useful to GIS users of all skill levels. Sometimes the interventions are small. In the NYC Colleges and Universities layer, for instance, Frank has simply redacted locations coded as colleges and universities from the Selected Facilities and Program Sites database released on Bytes of the Big Apple each year. Others are more complex. In the Subway Complexes and Ridership file, for example, Frank and his team at Baruch have harmonized MTA ridership data and expressed it in terms of the “complex” level (see the file documentation of this methodology). Layers such as this make it immensely more convenient for users to study transit in the city.

We’re excited to extend our collaboration and add even more files created by Frank and his team. For those in the GeoBlacklight community who are curious, this collaboration represents a combination of institutional resources that we think is promising. Baruch CUNY has put in a great deal of work to develop these files but (for now) lacks the technology stack to publish data on Geoserver and maintain an independent instance of GeoBlacklight. NYU has already done the legwork, so by acquiring the files, we pledge to not only preserve the data but also to make it available to the cross-institution community. We hope that others will be able to follow suit. As always, all of metadata is available on OpenGeoMetadata.

By adding this data into our collection, we’ve not only preserved it (and attached relevant documentation), but also made it exceedingly easy to add administrative boundaries and public data to NYC-related mapping projects. For example, look at this quick visualization of the Bronx. I’ve added the MapPLUTO file of the Bronx to my account in CartoDB and created a choropleth map that shows the year (before 1975 and after 1975) that each building was constructed.

By clicking on each parcel, you can see the year of its construction. This is just one element of the data available to be displayed; check out many others in the PLUTO codebook. In all, there are about 50 files added, and this is the first of many forthcoming additions of NYC spatial data. To browse all of the items in our collection, visit the Spatial Data Repository and search “Bytes of the Big Apple.”