Driving around the City of Philadelphia, it seems impossible to miss the colorful murals that sprawl across building sides.
Now, through a project created by the School of Design and the School of Social Work, these murals are accessible on the Web as well.
In May 2003, Penn's Cartographic Modeling Lab -- which specializes in geographic information systems and spatial research -- first introduced muralBase as a portal to access this information.
"We've been getting a lot of positive feedback on the program," CML Faculty Director and School of Social Work professor Dennis Culhane said. "Of all the projects that we've taken on, this has the most fun sort of content because it deals with something artistic and it gains people's attention."
MuralBase is the latest extension to the Neighborhood Information System, which also includes parcelBase and neighborhoodBase -- allowing researchers to track development areas and housing patterns.
"The larger mission of [NIS] is to both archive the data about the City of Philadelphia that is maintained by different government agencies for research purposes," Culhane explains, "but also to be able to broadcast it back in a user-friendly way to the community and to city agencies."
While the parcelBase and neighborhoodBase programs may have more serious functions, muralBase adds an upbeat spin to NIS.
"The muralBase program was borne out of the idea that parcelBase and neighborhoodBase did a very good job at documenting vacancy and abandonment and some of the signs of deterioration," NIS Outreach Coordinator Bradley Breuer said.
"So muralBase was really an effort to start documenting some of the positive redevelopment that has been going on in the city," the College junior added.
MuralBase was created by CML in partnership with the Philadelphia Department of Recreation's Mural Arts Program.
"The Mural Arts Program provide[d] us with the data," Breuer said. "Our collaboration with them was in designing the Web site and the ongoing collaboration is in supplying this data and how it is updated into our system."
The partnership between the two -- funded by the William Penn Foundation -- allowed the creation of the muralBase Web site, which in total offers a searchable database to an array of over 2,000 murals, including information on the artists and neighborhoods behind these murals.
