New Maps and a New Dashboard for STPAO
An update on some new materials at STPAO
It’s been hard to create a tax district map of St. Tammany Parish that I actually like.
The irregular borders. The variations in size. The unique shapes. None of it lends itself to “pretty” mapping, but maps must be made.
The above version is the closest I’ve come to liking a map of the tax districts in St. Tammany Parish to date. It’s been 11+ years since I started making maps at the St. Tammany Parish Assessor’s Office. I guess you could call that progress.
For this version, I abandoned the typical method — using GIS to symbolize each of the districts in a unique color and apply the labeling automatically — and set off to make a playful map. For this I went with a simple color scheme (via Color Supply) and labeling method that made sense with the overall design. After creating the basemap in QGIS, custom fonts and map finishing were done in Canva.
The one thing that could not be done easily in Canva, however, was the broken neatline. That was easier to do in the QGIS layout editor using guides than it was on the Canva web app. Maybe it is easier to do that kind of work on the desktop version of Canva? If anyone knows of a good way to do a broken neatline in Canva, I’m on the lookout. Please leave a note in the comments.
Interactive Dashboard
Project managers are often asked to provide updates about projects. Many of those updates involve numbers, and numbers are good for visualizations. To that end, I recently spent some time developing an interactive dashboard to track the progress of mapping projects at the St. Tammany Parish Assessor’s Office.
The new-to-me thing that was exciting to develop for this particular project was using Plotly to generate the HTML files for the interactive charts. This was much easier than expected:
import plotly.io as pio
# Save plots to HTML files in the specified directory
pio.write_html(fig_work_types, file=os.path.join(output_dir, 'work_type_counts_breakdown.html'), auto_open=True)
pio.write_html(fig_reviewers, file=os.path.join(output_dir, 'reviewer_counts_breakdown.html'), auto_open=True)The Python script that generates these reports now can extract the latest data via a SQL script, create and style the graphs, generate static image files of each graph, and create the interactive web pages for each graph. The only thing left to do after it runs is update the splash page for the dashboards and serve it all up to the web via GitHub.
Updated Status Report Maps
A few months ago, the team at the St. Tammany Parish Assessor’s Office celebrated a milestone: 130,000 parcels drawn and accounted for in GIS.
The website received some fresh maps last week and some updated accounting. As of May 31, there now are more than 131,000 parcels in STPAO’s Geographic Information System.
Onward and upward!