Projects

California Children and Families Commission (First 5)

VESTRA has been working with the California Children and Families Commission (First 5) since 2004. VESTRA initially worked with First 5 to address match 2.23 million records from birth records databases. The process began with address cleansing to ensure that data structure was conducive to automated geo-coding. Next, address matching was completed, adding longitude, latitude, match codes, and the 2000 Census tract fields to each record.

Manual geocoding was performed on records with low match codes. All records were kept confidential and all files were encrypted when passed between client and contractor.   First 5 contracted again with VESTRA in 2005 to incorporate data displayed as a time-series analysis on the agency’s existing Internet site. The time-series analysis allows users to display data from multiple time periods on the web site maps. Other modifications include added data, expanded functionality, refined help page, and enhanced symbolization.   VESTRA then worked on a third project with First 5 to further enhance the Internet site. These enhancements allowed First 5 users to access the GIS via user login and password to upload their new data points into the web site. Once the data is uploaded, it can be address matched and overlaid onto the existing First 5 web site maps. Since the enhancements now include login and password protection, users will be able to save their address data into datasets. These datasets will be associated with the user’s account and no other user will have access to that data. Users will display their datasets in conjunction with one or more other First 5 datasets and will be able to choose from a palette of symbols for rendering each individual dataset.