POSTool - Winner of the Planning Institute of Australia (WA) - Best Planning Idea: Big Project Award.

On 8 November, 2013 POSTool was awarded the Planning Institute of Australia (WA) - Best Planning Idea: Big Project Award.

The judges identified POSTool as: 

This, first-of-its-kind, web-based geospatial tool has the potential to have a significant impact on how we

plan, locate and develop public open space. The tool provides unique, innovative and consistent information

via an extensive spatial database accessible to planning professionals, researchers and the general public.

It is a rigorous and responsive tool that enables a greater interpretation of the value and opportunity that public open space provides and allows the modelling of population growth on the current and future access and provision of public open space.

We thank everyone for their support and feedback as we usher POSTool into a new era.

The End is Just the Beginning

On Tuesday 1 October 2013, POS Tool was officially launched at a Parks and Leisure Australia workshop held at UWA.

In addition, UWA issued a media release on the day titled “Perth's great outdoors: just an urban myth?” - http://www.news.uwa.edu.au/201310016090/research/perths-great-outdoors-just-urban-myth. The information was picked up by The West Australian newspaper resulting in a half page spread on 2 October 2013 as well as interviews with Prof Bull on ABC 720 and 6PR.

The End is Near

Final Product

September 13, 2013

Positive Places has reached the end of development and as of October 1^st all functions of the POS Tool will be complete and available to the general public.

Introductory Product Information

POS Tool provides information on the provision and location of public open space (POS) and the facilities and amenities provided within parks across the Perth and Peel regions. POS Tool delivers wide applicability to the general public, planners and developers, and researchers alike. 

For the general public, the Tool offers a quick and simple way to find parks in your local area and see what facilities are provided. Users can find closest parks to an address, locate a park with certain facilities or simply browse for parks using the intuitive map interface.

For planners and developers, the POS Tool provides support for local and regional planning decisions focused on the provision of parks and park amenity. Users can visualise and assess the spatial distribution of POS (including parks, nature and bushland) by suburb or local government authority and analyse summary data on POS provision, park amenity, gaps in current provision and future needs.

For researchers, the POS Tool provides an opportunity to assess POS-related information for use in research projects requiring data on POS (including parks, nature and bushland, school grounds, and residual areas). POS variables can be exported and used in combination with other information sets such as census or your own data.

Instructional Product Information

Using the simple search tool users can search for POS by address, POS name or by suburb and LGA. Once identified, the location of a POS can be visualised in the map viewer and information concerning the facilities and amenities provided by a POS can be examined. An example of a single POS search is shown in the figure below. 

If searching for POS by suburb or LGA, statistics concerning the number of POS, the distribution of POS facilities, area and number of persons living within a certain distance (catchment) of POS is returned. This information can then be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet for use in reports or linked with additional information. An example of a suburb search is shown in the figure below.

POS Tool also offers a suite of advanced functions that can be reached following a quick registration process. These include the ability to draw a user defined area of interest directly on screen and the ability to upload a user defined region as a GIS shapefile for which POS statistics are then calculated. In addition, the POS Tool allows users to scenario test the relationship between changes in population structure for a user defined area and the provision of POS. An example of the POS scenario testing tool is shown in the figure below.

Recently, the POS Tool has been nominated for a Planning Institute of Australia WA Innovation Award and is currently being used to examine the relationship between POS access and health outcomes by the researchers at the Centre for the Built Environment and Health. Outside the Centre, research informed by POS Tool includes the influence of POS on housing prices and the relationship between airborne pollutants, POS and men's health. 

Getting started

Please refer to the deployment guide (link coming soon) on instructions on how to download and build the POS Tool.

Documentation

There are a number of manual and document resources available:

• User manual - http://www.postool.com.au/static/documents/POS_Tool_Users_Guide.pdf
• Blog - http://positiveplaces.blogspot.com.au/
• Google Source Code repositories - https://code.google.com/p/positive-places/
• Technical documentation - https://code.google.com/p/positive-places/w/list
• Overview diagram -The following diagram outlines the POS Tool architecture.

Product re-usability information

The POS Tool was developed as a standalone web GIS application drawing upon open source java script libraries and a geographic web framework in conjunction with an object-relational database management system. The system may be of interest to those delivering geographic information through open source web based GIS applications. Whilst the application in its entity is less useful to developers, the specific GIS data manipulation and query components written in Python may provide solutions to complex spatial data handling and query problems including network catchment calculations and dasymetric mapping approaches often implemented in proprietary GIS. 

Contextual Product Information

POS Tool is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License. As POS Tool has been developed through feedback from a number of stakeholder workshops, targeted stakeholder interviews and user assessments of the software, the application is considered mature and fit for purpose. Although the sustainability of the product has been considered throughout the project and POS Tool has been designed to function with limited intervention, maintenance may occur in a number of ways as appropriate:

·        GAIA Resources will provide 2 years of web hosting and hardware warranty.

·        An automated data upload procedure has been built-in to the system allowing for data updates to be implemented by CBEH staff without intervention from GAIA Resources.

·        The team at CBEH may continue to identify new components to be added to POS Tool extending the applications spatial analytic capabilities.

·        Further enhancements and fixes may be conducted by GAIA Resources as additional funding opportunities become available.

·        The code is open source so that other groups can draw upon our innovations.

·        The system has extensive documentation to explain the use and design of the system as well as data collection and manipulation.

POSTool Software Test and User Assessment

During the development of the POSTool we have implemented two levels of testing. First a rigorous software testing protocol is implemented to make sure that all segments of the Tool and website are functioning properly. This is then followed with a ‘user assessment’ survey distributed to relevant stakeholders. In addition, we welcome comments through our POSTool website via email (postool-sph@uwa.edu.au) and through our Facebook page (http://www.http://www.facebook.com/PublicOpenSpaceTooll). The following text briefly outlines our software testing procedures followed by the results of our ‘user assessment’ as well as comments which we have received through email or on our Facebook page.   

Software Testing

Unit testing for the POS Tool was undertaken using the Django unit testing framework, which is in turn based on the Python unittest library.

Unit tests seek to automatically test small individual pieces of code, this allows for bugs to be located quickly as well as facilitating simplified code integration by ensuring that individual code modules continue to function correctly once integrated into the entire piece of software.

For the POS Tool unit testing were based around individual user functions, for example the statistics created for a region search are all generated by a python function and individual unit tests were created for this function to ensure that valid statistics are always produced.  

As issues were identified, they were addressed buy the GAIA software development team.  

User Assessment

The POSTool ‘user assessment’ was conducted through the deployment of a user assessment survey to a select number of relevant stakeholders. Each stakeholder received an assessment form asking participant to respond to the following questions:

1. What is your understanding of the purpose of the POSTool?
2. Based on the current version of the POSTool, how do you think you or your organisation      will use the resource?
3. How do you find the general layout of the website’s pages?
4. How do you find general navigation through the website?
5. Were you able to easily search for park information based on an address, by park name, by LGA/suburb?
6. How did you find the presentation of information about a single park and by LGA/suburb? 
7. For an LGA, please download and comment on the park summary data provide as a   spread sheet which can be viewed in MicroSoft Excel.
8. How did you find the spatial presentation of POS locations on the map interface?
9. Were you able to easily navigate around the map interface to find the POS you were    interested in?
10. Were you easily able to access help information through the FAQ pages?
11. Do you have any further comments?

Stakeholders surveyed included:

User 1	Health researcher
User 2	Computer engineering researcher
User 3	Local government planning consultant

User 1 feedback:

What worked

• “ I was pleasantly surprised and relieved about how user-friendly the website was to use – the tabs and options are presented in a way that makes intuitive sense – not having to keep going to  FAQ or help options to work out how to find your way around is the mark of good web-base tool design!”
• User friendly searching and the back space arrow works as on some web pages this brings you back to the beginning.
• Map is visually user friendly and easily navigable.

What didn't work

• The about information may be better placed before the disclaimer acceptance page. People may not know how to use the tool without some further information.
• I noticed that there was some missing information for my neighbourhood. Is there capacity for users to send in messages if they discover things like this or have a query?
• The boundaries of suburbs within an LGA are not shown. It would be nice to click on a suburb within an LGA then providing search results for that suburb.
• When people are on the ‘about’ page, it would be good if they could click on the words “address search” and go directly to the page where they can start doing just that… or else next to these is where there could be a let’s get started type button to click that takes the user to the appropriate option, rather than having to go back out of the ‘about’ page and back to main menu.
• The text in coloured boxes on some of the graphics in the help documentation is difficult to read.
• Some highlighted text remains on one of the help pages – I assume this is not meant be here.
• I wasn't sure what the upload tab is about. People get curious on websites and click things like this. What does this actually do?   

User 2 feedback

What worked

• “It is a great tool to spatially present the park information. Public will benefit from it to easily find the park information of the places that they are interested. For organisations, it is useful for better understanding and easily obtaining the park information for an area. People can use the information for planning or other community management purposes. The aggregated population data related to parks at the LGA level is also useful for related research.”
• The colour looks comfortable and represents the subject well.
• The website navigation is generally easy to use.
• For a single park, the presentation is good.
• The LGA summary data is good.

What didn't work

• The presentation of the map and park information was bit congested, especially with so much blank space on the page – maybe it is because I am using a big screen. I think it would look better to me if the top and bottom margins are shrunk a bit, and in that way more park information can be presented on the page.
• After clicking the ‘I Accept’ on the disclaimer page I was given the error ‘page not found’.
• The disclaimer page seems to be the homepage, but is not the direct page one would see through a Google search. That means if someone searches for POSTool through Google, he/she will be directed to the search interface, without a chance to view the disclaimer. There is no navigation button leading to the disclaimer, which is the homepage, throughout the website.
• I can search for suburbs and street addresses at the box for ‘address search’, but failed to search for suburbs at the box for ‘Suburb or Local Government Area’.
• The address that I typed in has to be chosen from the drop down menu. I would like to be able to search with the address I typed in, although the drop down menus is quite comprehensive.
• When I search for LGA, the map only demonstrates the LGA boundary and street map. I would like to see the park layer at least as an option to overlay on the map.
• For a single park, there is a lack of suburb information.
• When I entered the single park presentation mode, I cannot view the information of other parks. It will be more convenient if I still can click on any other park on the map as I navigate and view its information.
• After I clicked on a single park, it would be useful to still demonstrate the legend so that I can find out what is adjacent to or what is in the area more easily.
• Apply a darker green colour for the selected park, or use an outstanding border, just to better highlight my selection.
• It would be nice to allow downloading of the spatial layer of park information so that people can do analysis within their own GIS environment.

User 3 feedback

What worked

• Easily able to search for park information based on an address, by park name, by LGA/suburb but only after I went to the about page and realised what the differences between the 3 search options were.

What didn't work

• The opening page is the search page and there is no explanation regarding what happens when you search in each category. I would like to go to the About page first, then go in logical order to find out about the categories (and how to interpret them)
•  Instructions only given for top option (search for nearest green space).) - not sure the FAQ is the best heading here - need to understand what the user is looking at before hitting the search page. 
• What is the Upload Tab – is it well placed? 
• I found that you have to select an option every time a new search is conducted or the system reverts back to the previous selection. For example, I searched for Subiaco and selected "City of Subiaco" when it appeared below. When I went back to the search page, I then typed in Shire of Kalamunda and simply hit search (without selecting from list below) and it took me back to Subiaco.  Had to retype in Shire of Kalamunda and select from list before I could go there.
• Map image needs to be larger.
• On some address searches, once I expand the map (or zoomed out), I lost the marker.
• The information provided under the METADATA tab could be better presented as a page (tab) in its own right.
• The information provided concerning conversion information & statement regarding use (POS general summary) could be better presented as a page (tab) in its own right.
• Facility summary would be better if listed vertically rather than horizontally - really hard to read on iPad.
• http://www.postool.com.au/static/images/Table3.jpg - what does the 77.665% mean? (aligned with catchment distance in the table below) - The description contains this statement: For example, the table shown below indicates that 77.7% of the population of the City of Cockburn were resident within any park catchment area.
• Does this mean that 23.3% of the population don't live within any park catchment?
• It would also be useful to find out which parks are in which category.  For example, in City of Vincent, the count indicates there are 2 regional parks.  Is there any way to identify which parks are included in which category?
• Can numbers be reported to 1 decimal point (2 at most ...)?
• Can you use SMALL PARK (as per description contained in Livable Neighbourhood Guidelines) and SMALL OPEN SPACE (in reference to Department of Sport and Recreation classification). There is some considerable resistance to the use of POCKET PARK by planning and design professionals - it is considered pejorative and dismissive.
• Can be POS CATCHMENT be relabelled LNG CATCHMENT as this is what it actually references - with explanation given on suggested "here's what it all means" page/tab.
• The heading PARK QUALITY is misleading - you are assessing amenity, not quality.
• Language in several explanations is jargonistic and needs to be simplified.
• Town of Vincent is now CITY of Vincent.

Email and Facebook feedback

• “When using the search function it would be common for people to simply type in their suburb, but typing just the suburb does not always work. I’m in Rivervale and no drop down comes up for that. A couple of ways to deal with this, remove the word suburb or let the LGA come up for all the suburbs in it.”
• “...the POS tool would be even better if you could get a % POS for any suburb, and to identify the best and the worst suburbs. I live in South Hedland and POS is lousy, I’d love some evidence to give to Council!”

Addressing user feedback

The first phase of user testing has proved extremely useful. Issues such as a more informative entrance page providing background on the tool will now be followed by the disclaimer page and figures found in the about pages have been replaced by high resolution graphics to enhance viewability. Furthermore, comments concerning navigability of the website have been addressed by our development team and will be updated in the next build.

Search functions (including suburb search capabilities) will come online when the second stage of the POS Tool is released in early August addressing most concerns raised by users during the assessment process. Increasing the size of the map window, addition of suburb boundaries and map navigation issues are currently being discussed with our development team and we will endeavour to address these issues in due course.  

One user has raised some issue concerning the content of the about pages and terminology used. The definitions and terms used by various government agencies have been continually changing during the development of this tool. We will endeavour to work with the various government stakeholders to make sure that the terminology is correct and the information is presented in an understandable format and language. These issues will be addressed for the final release.

Finally, whilst we currently do not have an updating procedure in place, we do understand that this will be vital to keep the underlying data in the POS Tool current. Until we develop a formal process for crowd sourcing and verifying updates, we encourage users to email us with comments (postool-sph@uwa.edu.au) or logon to our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/PublicOpenSpaceTool).  

WE ARE LIVE! - http://www.postool.com.au

The POS Tool was launched on 12 June 2013 at the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) and Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) Public Open Space Forum at the Parmelia Hilton in Perth. Present were over 150 delegates from organisations such as the Department of Sport and Recreation, Department of Planning, Parks and Leisure Australia, WA Local Government Association, Department of Transport, Department of Water, Water Corporation, and Landcorp as well as various local governments and developers.   

Professor Fiona Bull provided a 45 minute talk outlining the POS Tool, POS data, Tool functionality, and potential uses through analysis of POS distribution across the Perth Metropolitan region. The Tool received a very positive response and will be featured at several other events in the coming months.

For more infromation please visit the POSTool website (http://www.postool.com.au), follow us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/PublicOpenSpaceTool) or email us at
(postool-sph@uwa.edu.au).  

Professor Fiona Bull describing why Public Open Space is important to physical and mental health.

WE ARE GOING LIVE!

As of June 12th, Positive Places POS Tool stage one will be available to the public. We are launching the tool at the Planning Institute of Australia WA's Public Open Space Forum. On June 12th you will be able to access the POS Tool at http://www.postool.com.au/cbeh/pos/home/.

We hope you enjoy the first release of our tool and find it useful. We will release the second stage of the POS Tool in the coming months which will provide increased functionality for research and planning applications.