Economic Development Apps

Context

Through a joint venture with PIERS, my team and I developed multiple visually appealing purpose built applications for economic development customers. That relationship has yielded two applications to date. The first application helps Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ) officials identify US companies that may benefit financially from joining an FTZ. The second gives county and state economic development offices a tool to identify foreign companies who may benefit by expanding into the US.

Data

21M bill of lading records of every ship, its contents (value and volume), its destination, and origin, that came into a US customs port in the last two years in addition to 250k new records every week.

Tech Notes

Data are delivered via a CSV file, so I developed bash scripts to upload the data to the PostgreSQL database using the Foreign Data Wrapper extension.
Built a geocoder using the US Census Bureau TIGER Line and master address database files to geocode as many US companies in the database as possible. [Note: Multiple geocoding services were considered, but due to financial constraints I decided to build our own.]
The bulk of the front-end applications are built using a combination of Handlebars, d3.js, jQuery, Highcharts, and Mapbox where applicable.
The back-end technologies include PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Node.js, Express, Redis, and Nginx.

Live Demos

FTZ Official Plus

FDI Prospects