Geography & Public Safety: Using ModelBuilder for Geographic Information System Tasks

This was published in the National Institute of Justice's Geography and Public Safety Bulletin:


Crime analysis requires a Geographic Information System (GIS)—a software program for capturing, managing, and analyzing geographic and spatial data—to process data and create data products (e.g., printed maps, pamphlets) for a wide audience. Crime data can change daily, which makes producing maps and other products a daunting task for many analysts. Automating regular tasks will save time and allow for more sophisticated tools for analysis. Crime analysts need a mapping program that allows them to regularly update data in a timely fashion. Environmental Systems Research Institute’s (ESRI) ModelBuilder is a component of a type of ArcMap that allows for drag-and-drop development of complex geoprocessing tasks (e.g., placing points on the map based on addresses, summarizing data). It helps crime analysts expedite their daily geoprocessing tasks for map production.

Advancing Earlier Modeling Tools

ESRI’s ModelBuilder is a drag-and-drop process modeling environment that comes standard with ArcMap version 9.x. ModelBuilder is an advancement of ArcView 3.x’s Geoprocessing Wizard Extension. Where the Geoprocessing Wizard was limited to tasks like spatially joining, merging, and clipping data, ESRI introduces all of ArcMap’s functional capabilities (e.g., spatial analysis, geoprocessing) into the Toolbox. A large number of different tools and tasks can be strung together in the literal sense of a systems technology: data go in, a process occurs, and data come out. The potential to string complex tasks together and automate them to run regularly makes ModelBuilder an attractive option for any Crime Analysis Unit.

The rest of the article, and a series of other articles can be found at
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/gpsBulletin-2008v1.pdf.pdf