The Map To Everything

Tucked into an unassuming box of a building off Jackson Road, ISciences does things with data that sound, to the uninitiated, like they belong in a William Gibson novel. The non-descript exterior of this office does nothing to betray the mastery of bytes and pixels that occurs inside every day – where information from NASA, the CIA, and the United Nations (to name just a few) can be transformed into startlingly crisp and colorful digital images – maps.

And while maps might not seem like the sexiest computer generated product the people in this office have enabled government and NGOs to apply their images in vital and nearly limitless ways – from the prediction of weather disasters like deadly tsunamis to the identification of unstable water supplies.

Strange as it might sound, this small Ann Arbor company has developed a product with far-reaching potential, allowing the relative impact analysis of everything from poverty and AIDS to pollution, food-shortages and birth-rates around the globe.

Maps and legends

Founded less than a decade ago, ISciences is both a software developer and consulting firm to a slew of private and public organizations, some ultra-confidential; others more public, like the China Data Center at the University of Michigan, and the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, at Columbia University, New York. The company describes itself on its website as "sustainability science and earth information products" but it's clear ISciences' slogan understates the potential impact of their software.

According to Lisa Emmer, who handles public relations for ISciences, part of the company's central philosophy is to help people better understand the world around them. Indeed, the beauty of the company's digital mapping is that one doesn't have to be a professional in software or data analysis to get meaning from its visualizations.

The centerpiece of ISciences is its TerraViva! software, created and tweaked by ISciences. Essentially, says Emmer, "TerraViva! was designed as an easy-to-use geographic information system about the earth and its people."

More importantly, the TerraViva! Software is "open source." In post-internet parlance, this means: free and ready to adapt. That's right, you can go online right now and use it for free. How can a company that enables research and advocacy groups like the World Resources Institute, Washington, D.C., the Pacific Disaster Center of Hawaii (among many others) to view data in such a novel way – give it away online for free?

"Letting potential clients use TerraViva! allows us to open the doors to the consulting side of the business," says Dave Carson, Director of Geospatial Solutions for ISciences.

So although ISciences provides its basic data-mapping capability for free, it also contracts with organizations that have specialized data needs. An enhanced online version of the software, TerraViva!: Global Data Analyst, is available for a small fee.

What makes a data map?

ISciences develops its visual models not by viewing maps as a series of lines and shapes, but rather as dots, explains Carson. Each dot has a value assigned to it, and that value, in turn, is assigned a color "to make it look pretty," he half jokes. When different data sources are entered into the software, it can be used to predict things like water shortages, population fluctuations and other global dynamics in vivid detail.

A great deal of Carson's work involves adapting the existing software to new data sources, such as infectious disease outbreaks. For instance, say a province in China reports several cases of bird flu. An interested party can apply this information against existing data through TerraViva! and determine, for example, whether the outbreak correlates with drought patterns or population density or the number of local hospitals. The potential offered by Iscience's software is enormous when you consider the wide range of variables that can be entered into the system.

Early use of this kind of data mapping, albeit without computers, was vital to the work of 19^th century surgeon and anesthesiologist, Dr. John Snow, and his role in the identification of the source of an Asiatic cholera outbreak in the Soho District of London.  The so-called Broad Street Pump Outbreak of 1954, which hit a particular neighborhood and its inhabitants particularly hard, sparked Snow, who did not believe as many did at the time that disease came from a "miasma" in the air, to start seeking an alternative source of the outbreak.  Dr. Snow, now regarded as a pioneer of epidemiology, was able to isolate the source of the outbreak – a water pump on Broad Street – by mapping out individual cases and thereby discovering a relationship between each case and the water pump. Imagine the number of lives that might have been saved had Snow had access to IScience's software and it gives you a hint at the potential applications of such technology.


Global vision, local preference

In one example of data-mapping, researchers overlay maps of acquired data, each focusing on one of 17 different geo and social activities --fishing, climate change, pollution, etc-- and "produced a composite map of the toll that humans have exacted on the seas."

The result is startling, illustrating in brilliant colors that, indeed, there is a relationship between declining ocean quality and human intrusion. If information like this can convincingly demonstrate to non-believers the impact of human behavior on the environment then perhaps it will be easier for governments to agree on the ways and means of combating unsustainable practices.

"Global representations allow us to see the relative impact of issues like poverty, AIDS, even types of land cover and populations," explains Carson.

These are the types of issues and ideas that can find a ready audience here in Ann Arbor. The overlap of social and environmental awareness with an innovative high-tech sensibility makes the local community a good fit for start-up tech companies like ISciences.

"We could probably do much better as a company if we were in Washington, D.C., because of availabilities of contracts," says Carson, "but we like being here. "We just like Ann Arbor."