Professional planners and neighborhood groups that want to build concise master plans for development now can turn to www.pghsnap.com, a Web reference tool that compiles data about Pittsburgh's neighborhoods in one location.

In the works for four years by the city planning department, SNAP stands for Sector and Neighborhood Asset Profiles/Action Planning. The 792-page resource is a trove of color-coded, thematic information about 90 neighborhoods, offered separately and in clusters of 16 planning sectors.

"It is basically a collection of all the data that was out there already but in many places and with varying quality of analysis," said city planner Justin Miller.

Planning director Noor Ismail said SNAP is the framework her staff will use to build the first-ever citywide comprehensive plan. By mid-year, SNAP will be updated with detailed maps of the city's business districts.

SNAP provides information from multiple sources that will automatically update demographic, geographic, economic, zoning, education, infrastructural and transportation data.

It also offers maps and automatic links to the city's new Geographic Information System, an interactive online mapping service that's a companion to SNAP, available at www.pghgis.com.

Visitors to the site can see where public art and parks are located, how densely the housing is arranged, and the percentage of land that is prone to landslides in each neighborhood.

They can research percentages of a neighborhood's residents with higher-education degrees or who drive alone to work, as well as the value of building permits or the number of street trees and property liens there. They also can find thumbnail narratives about neighborhood histories.

For example, Esplen began as a railroad camp, and 52 percent of Squirrel Hill North residents commute alone in cars. Mines lie under 90.4 percent of Allentown. Clicking the "zoning" icon produces a map that shows the zoning status of properties.

The "action planning" part of the tool is "like a community playbook" where data is clustered and analyzed to help neighborhoods build strategies to attack problems, such as blight, Mr. Miller said.

Elly Fisher, assistant director at the Oakland Planning and Development Corp., said that nonprofit agency has already been digging into SNAP.

"We're looking at a real estate strategy in Oakland, and SNAP has been invaluable in showing us the current state of the neighborhood's housing and to compare the different parts of Oakland," she said.

Ms. Ismail said the work to create SNAP was done by her staff with tech support from the Community Information System. The data collection work and software were supported by a $100,000 state community development grant, according to Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's office.

"It is a mass of information [meant] to stimulate the right questions, to get communities to think about what their strategies will be instead of being blindsided by problems," she said.

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