Improving GRASP: a geospatial repository for analysis and safety planning

To increase public safety levels in communities, researchers and law enforcement agencies analyze spatial data to reveal crime patterns and relationships. For the past two years, teams of students have worked with the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to create a centralized data repository for storing this data. This repository, named the Geospatial Repository for Analysis and Safety Planning (GRASP), streamlines the data collecting process. The system has been successful, yet several drawbacks remain. These drawbacks include cost, response time of queries, lack of security features, unintuitive interface, and the inability to conform to federal standards for storing data. To alleviate these problems, our team changed the database backend of the system, added security settings, developed a visual mapping component, and reformatted the metadata to conform to the federal standards. At the conclusion of the project, GRASP was $6000 cheaper, 97 percent faster, and complied with all federal standards.