Dashboards, Hubs and Apps
Why Dashboards and Hubs are so Important with Property Information
As we see with the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 GIS dashboard, a lot of critical information is quickly communicated and easily understood by nearly everyone. This dashboard has had over one billion views at the time of this writing. These dashboards provide an understanding with just a glance. By combining graphs, maps, charts and clearly stated numbers, dashboards are essential for delivering understanding.
But dashboards aren’t enough. The data behind the dashboard and the web services it connects to are very valuable in other applications, initiatives and focused solutions. For example, developing a dashboard for just your state like this one for Florida that conveys information at the county level requires access to the authoritative data and services. That’s were hubs come in. A hub is a community engagement platform that helps organize data, community communications and provides for a two-way conversation, not just a one-way website. A hub provides data, updates, resources and the ability to connect. This COVID-19 GIS Hub is a good example.
These hubs are not just valuable during a global pandemic to convey information, but valuable in our daily work to engage our communities and improve trust and confidence in government, and in our case, land records information. There are standard hub frameworks called ‘initiatives’ and can be deployed with your community’s branding and look and feel. The ability to configure and not develop custom code makes hubs affordable and quick to deploy.
ArcGIS Hub is delivered as Saas (software as a service) which means that you don’t need your own hardware and software - its configurable and all hosted in the cloud. This reduces deployment and maintenance time freeing up time for you to do what’s important. It also gives you access to vast amounts of data that would be extremely difficult to collect and use otherwise. One such data set is population data which is quite useful in generating infographics that can show the characteristics of a neighborhood.
Property assessment - a core function in local government where assessors locate, inventory and map real property collecting dozens of property characteristics to calculate fair and equitable valuations for local property tax. Part of this process is sharing this data and how values were calculated back with the public. Using hubs, information is quickly delivered to the public, easily understood and available on any device.
Public expectations have evolved on how they want to get information. Expectations have also evolved in how data is communicated. Publishing raw data without context may meet open data and transparency mandates but do little to positively influence the trust and confidence the public has in your office. Hubs enable you to change the way you interact and connect with the public. And you can configure them to tell your story the way you want it told and to fit into your community’s web look and feel.
Equitable Property Value (EPV) is a hub initiative configured for assessors. It combines apps that are used daily by your constituents like the Tax Parcel Viewer, Floodplain Inquiry and Residential Comp Finder. EPV has a calendar to post your office’s activities, meetings and assessment schedule and has an appeals form to simplify the process.
Your data is valuable. Its valuable to you and its valuable to other departments, taxpayers, real estate professionals and constituents. Deliver a contemporary public engagement solution and unleash your data with summary statistics, storymaps, apps, maps, calendars and more. We know that dashboards help convey information quickly and easily and hubs help deliver data and information with a single access point that is intuitive, easy to use, configurable and is delivered as SaaS.
Hubs and dashboards are valuable. They convey information and data quickly to a broad audience. ArcGIS Hub is easily configured and deployed. Equitable Property Value leverages ArcGIS Hub to deliver a contemporary experience to your stakeholders.