This repository contains code for creating business areas and supporting data products.
A business area is a zone containing a spatial cluster of businesses that share some common character. "Character" here is defined by a set of attributes describing properties of the immediate vicinity. That is, "localized" attributes indicate, for a given business, things like "there are a lot of restaurants around here" or "there are a lot of white-collar employers nearby".
In the course of determining business areas, you also create business category labels, road network data files, localized business attributes, inter-business driving distances, and maybe some other stuff.
The code here is set up to support fully automated processing once a small set of
data files is staged in a certain way. For any given MSA to be processed, you will need
to set up files with the organization and format of things in the directory named
proto. I.e. proto is a prototype for a correctly staged MSA directory -- you would typically
change its name to the MSA name, like 'boston' or 'duluth'.
The directory named eero contains all the required python code. The code is hard-wired
to operate on a directory structured like the proto directory.
All processing gets kicked off using the unix make utility. Just get into the
proto directory and type make. All processing will then happen automatically,
God willing.