je-nunez/map_of_emergency_locations_in_toronto

map of different types of emergency locations in Toronto, in R

Map of different types of emergency locations in Toronto

This is a map of different types of emergency locations in Toronto, in R.

WARNING before use

This program must not be used in emergency situations where a life must be saved.

This program may not give the precise information necesary to find emergency locations in the situation when a life must be saved, where every second matters. This program might execute slowly in these urgent situations or might not finish to execute in these situations at all, and even then, the locations shown in the map by this program may not be available at this critical emergency, losing precious time, for the data this program uses from the Open Data of the City of Toronto may not be updated real-time when an emergency location happens to be congested or unavailable. (Besides, the handling of an emergency usually requires a logistic involving different types of public services, not only one, made available as soon as possible at the place of the emergency. To coordinate this logistic urgently, the intervention of an expert human agent is obligatory. This program is not related nor interacts with 9-1-1 infrastructures.)

WIP

This project is a work in progress. The implementation is incomplete and subject to change. The documentation can be inaccurate.

Emergency locations represented on the Map

This program downloads and uses several ESRI shapefiles made available by the Open Data initiative of the City of Toronto.

So far, the following ESRI shapefiles or CSV files are used:

[Police Facilities] (http://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/contentonly?vgnextoid=4071790e6f21d210VgnVCM1000003dd60f89RCRD)

[Automatic External Defibrillators] (http://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/contentonly?vgnextoid=6455da18d9f44410VgnVCM10000071d60f89RCRD)

[Ambulance Station Locations] (http://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/contentonly?vgnextoid=93f91c98d2b6d310VgnVCM10000071d60f89RCRD&vgnextchannel=1a66e03bb8d1e310VgnVCM10000071d60f89RCRD)

[Air Conditioned Public Places & Cooling Centres] (http://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/contentonly?vgnextoid=e7356d1900531510VgnVCM10000071d60f89RCRD)

Requirements

Besides R and network connectivity, this program requires the wget program (it can be done also with curl), the unzip command-line tool, and the ogr2ogr command-line tool. This last program can be installed from the gdal rpm package (RedHat) or gdal-bin (Debian) or gdal (brew in Mac OS/X):

    dnf install gdal

    apt-get install gdal

    brew install gdal

(These belong to the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library)

Example of the maps generated

The program in R needs to be called after the shell script, and generates two maps, one with all the emergency locations together in one common map, and another with each type of emergency location standing alone in a separated map).

Samples of these two maps are below: