Background

This is part of an ongoing project at Pratt Institute’s Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative, that seeks to redesign the institute’s current GIS library. The library, which contains thousands of datasets, is organized first by location (ex. US, New York, International, etc.) and then by topic (ex. environment, transportation, etc.). To help with the first step of this redesign, I wrote a Python script that scraped the structure of the current library and visualized it as a hierarchical network. From this visualization, we learned that there was considerable overlap in the topics found within each location. This suggests that a relational database may better serve the needs of users.