Identify user stories and profiles

[johnkit]

For a starting point, we should outline the main UVDAT features, potential benefits, and unique capabilities. Main features include:

• Geospatial data ingest: vector (geojson, shapefile), raster (geotiff)
• Network reconstruction from vector data
• OSM road interface
• OSM buildings interface
• Custom data interfaces (National Grid)
• Downscaled climate model prediction (extreme precipitation)
• Hydrology analysis (flood modeling)
• 2D/3D visualization
• Meta data presentation

[johnkit]

Passing this first feature list to LLM produced the following

Potential Customers for Your Geospatial Software

Based on the features you've described, your software could be valuable to a wide range of organizations that work with geospatial data. Here are some potential customer segments:

Government Agencies

• Environmental Protection Agencies: For monitoring environmental conditions, pollution, and natural hazards.
• Transportation Departments: For infrastructure planning, traffic management, and emergency response.
• Emergency Management Agencies: For disaster preparedness, response, and recovery.
• Land Management Agencies: For natural resource management, conservation, and land use planning.
• Urban Planning Departments: For city development, infrastructure planning, and sustainability initiatives.

Research Institutions and Universities

• Geographers: For spatial analysis, modeling, and visualization.
• Environmental Scientists: For studying climate change, natural hazards, and ecosystem dynamics.
• Civil Engineers: For infrastructure design, planning, and risk assessment.
• Hydrologists: For water resource management, flood modeling, and watershed analysis.

Private Sector

• Engineering and Consulting Firms: For infrastructure projects, environmental impact assessments, and urban planning.
• Insurance Companies: For risk assessment, catastrophe modeling, and pricing.
• Utilities: For network planning, asset management, and disaster response.
• Agriculture and Forestry Companies: For land management, crop monitoring, and natural resource conservation.
• Logistics and Transportation Companies: For route optimization, fleet management, and supply chain analysis.

Non-Profit Organizations

• Conservation Groups: For habitat preservation, biodiversity monitoring, and climate change adaptation.
• Disaster Relief Organizations: For emergency response and recovery efforts.
• Community Development Organizations: For urban planning, infrastructure development, and social impact projects.

Specific Use Cases

• Climate Change Research: Analyzing climate model data to understand future impacts on ecosystems, infrastructure, and communities.
• Urban Planning: Developing sustainable cities by assessing land use patterns, transportation networks, and infrastructure needs.
• Disaster Management: Simulating natural hazards (e.g., floods, hurricanes) to improve preparedness and response.
• Infrastructure Planning: Designing and managing transportation networks, utilities, and other critical infrastructure.
• Environmental Monitoring: Tracking changes in ecosystems, pollution levels, and natural resources.

By targeting these specific customer segments and use cases, you can effectively market your software and demonstrate its value to potential clients.

[johnkit]

Refocus

Regardless of UVDAT's specific feature set, its primary differentiators are data collection, data modeling/processing, and user interface/visualization. Data collections themselves might be key product differentiators

From the UVDAT Road Map:

UVDAT will be a web-based platform for conducting analytics in the urban context, targeting analysts and developers who need AI-ready platforms. UVDAT will provide access to a wide variety of urban data ready to be used in AI and visualization. The datasets will fall into four categories: Grid (e.g., Raster), Geometry (e.g., Vector), and unstructured and network (e.g., CSV). UVDAT will provide web interfaces for uploading and running AI/Simulation models that process or consume urban data. The focus will be on supporting analytics that answer “what-if” scenarios using network and geo-referenced data. Upon completion, it will provide a means to visualize results in a Map or a 2D chart. E.g., Jack’s flood simulation task Tile2net https://github.com/VIDA-NYU/tile2net GeoWatch https://github.com/Kitware/geowatch UVDAT will integrate with third-party libraries and tools for data access and processing to better incorporate community effort that would lead to easier adoption of UVDAT in customers workflow E.g., integration with OSMnx, QGIS, ArcGIS? and STAC server

Looking more locally, what New York State agencies overlap with UVDAT's capabilities? e.g., NYS Department of Transportation NYSDOT

[johnkit]

NY Department of Transportation NYSDOT

1. One potential user story might involve NYSDOT's bridge inspection and maintenance program

• NYSDOT tracks 17K bridges across the state
• Every construction and maintenance contract is available as a public record.
• Bridges are typically inspected every 2 years, going back many decades. Inspection records include original plans, load rating, vulnerabilities, photos, sketches/dimensions, estimated traffic load, geocoordinates, ...
• UVDAT could provide an application to display current bridge status, with meta data culled from the construction, maintenance, and inspection data. (Is this anything they wouldn't/couldn't already do with ArcGIS?)
• Also, this collection of data, combined with environmental data (weather, stream height, flow rate histories) could potentially be used to train a model predicting bridge life cycle and future maintenance requirements.

2. A second potential user story might involve NYSDOT tracking the states network of roads (highways, state routes, local roads) estimated to cover 80K miles. Data is being accumulated in real time at substantial rates. Total dataset size is likely orders of magnitude greater than for bridges.

[johnkit]

Copied NYSDOT information including dataset links, to Google Slides at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zC2OE-EziJ-F3E_s9NS2vlL5ZAOalvR9EDlU8Y9UtEk/edit?usp=sharing