Surveying, Mapping and GIS

GIS TechnoGeekdom

Posted by Dave Smith On 6/15/2007 08:41:00 PM 2 comments

I have to admit, I think I'm getting a bit too much of my royal GIS geek on...

Yes, that actually is ArcPad, loaded up with base maps for San Diego, and I created a few extra layers, with trolley routes, BatchGeocoded places of interest, and plenty of other goodies in advance of the ESRI UC, and I'll be tooling around with bluetooth GPS to boot... As usual, I'll be loaded, downloaded, wired, WiFi'd, bluetoothed, GPS'ed, web 2.0'd, AJAXed, geo-enabled, deepfried and sanctified...

Emergency Response and GIS

Posted by Dave Smith On 6/14/2007 07:23:00 AM 0 comments

One of the other events which will be happening concurrent to the ESRI Conference is the SONS 07 event - "Spill Of National Significance", which will replicate a major catastrophic event - to include simulated release of oil, hazardous material, and/or other associated threats to health and safety. This year's event will take place in the midwest, replicating an earthquake along the New Madrid fault zone.

Through our work with USEPA, we will be among the participants in this event, as we did for Hurricane Katrina, supporting the effort through our own GIS staff at the USEPA Emergency Operations Center. The two main stakeholders and participants on the environmental side are USEPA and USCG, along with FEMA, state, regional and private sector participants to support the response as appropriate.

It's good to see these events take place, and it no doubt will give us many more new lessons learned and opportunities to refine response. The bottom line still comes to being proactive, in terms of GIS preparedness, as opposed to reactive. With regard to availability of information on impacted facilities, we will no doubt be in better condition than we were for Katrina, but many of the other pieces are still lacking. Specifically, there is still little transparency or availability of realtime or near-realtime data, when it comes to assessing response capacity and many other pieces.

Here, we should go back to HSPD-5 which deals with communications and interoperability, and examine how well our GIS assets work together, and how well they support standards, how well-documented they are to allow users to make informed decisions regarding the data.

Closely affiliated and associated with this is HSPD-8 for preparedness - which comes along with a host of other questions - how current, scalable, flexible and robust is your GIS data, and does it address the need? For example, how many burn units are immediately available in a 100-mile radius right now, how many pieces of fire apparatus are available right now - with the right now being key. In looking at a dozen or so counties nearby, I see almost 500 fire stations, almost 200 law enforcement offices, and nearly 200 emergency medical providers. Yes, they participate in surveys and report in data, but how timely is it? Now consider that Pennsylvania has 67 counties, and the scale of the problem magnifies greatly. Say your EOC is impacted, loss of power, loss of communications, otherwise rendered inoperable. Can you cascade your operations over to a COOP site and continue seamlessly?

Here in Pennsylvania, we have many gaps, overlaps and stovepipes for data and communications flow, and many points of failure, from local to local, local to county, county to county, local to state, county to state, between state agencies, local to fed, county to fed, state to fed, and fed to fed. I can't think of any one of these which genuinely works seamlessly with the next. This is what we have been referring to as the gap of pain, and something for which we have a concept and team already up and running to address.

The February 2007 snowstorm, which caused widespread damage and notoriously left hundreds of motorists trapped on Interstate 78 for 20 hours, still remains a major fiasco here in Pennsylvania, with solutions still thoroughly unadressed politically, fiscally and bureaucratically. On the other hand, technologically, we can address the data, communications and preparedness issues. This is something that we have been looking at quite closely ever since 9/11, investing a lot of time and thought into, and something I will be running through again, considering the SONS exercise. It's time to act and become proactive, and to break through the stovepipes and fiefdoms.

Letters to Aunt Poly

Posted by Dave Smith On 6/13/2007 02:20:00 PM 1 comments

A GIS Advice Column?

Letters to Aunt Poly...

Dear Aunt Poly,

My name is .tiffany Image and I am 12 years old. I am a very responsible girl and I always keep my pixels organized like my parents have taught me. Before I go out I make sure I have them all arranged nice and neatly. As my parents always say, Image is everything.

My problem is my 8-year old brother .jpeg. He is a total slob! When friends ask him over to play, he is out the door in a flash. He leaves his pixels all over the house and never picks up after himself. Often he loses 80%, even 90% of his pixels! His teachers say he is ADD and unresolved. I say he is irresponsible. It’s really not fair, but my parents just say that I have to be more responsible because I am older. Aunt Poly, how can I teach my little brother to stop being a slob and degrading the family Image?

Dear Aunt Poly,

I’m a geodatabase featureset, just starting my sophomore year in high school. I like hanging out and interfacing with the other objects in my geodatabase. Lately it seems like I’m always in trouble with my parents. They are both coverages and are really strict! I try to do my chores and schoolwork, but the least little gap or dangle, and they go totally command-line of me – I’m locked down in edit mode, no interfacing, no hanging out, not even ODBC calls until I clean and rebuild everything! Aunty Poly, my friends’ parents are all shapefiles, and they’re not nearly so strict. How can I get my parents to lighten up and let me have a little fun?

Dear Aunt Poly,

I always took pride in my data lineage and relations. My parents told me I was descended from original double-precision stereophotogrammetry with first-order control and full AAT. Recently in my spare time I began researching the family metadata. Aunt Poly, I was shocked! I’ve found I’m originally from uncontrolled TIGER line files and old DLG data, with no standards of precision or accuracy! Aunty Poly, I’m mortified. How can I possibly look my friends in the eye? How can I forgive my parents for lying to me? Can I possibly overcome this background to make something of myself?

Dear Aunt Poly,

I’m a 22 year-old .dbf table from a small town in Alabama. My parents raised me to maintain proper rows and columns and high data standards. At a college party a few weeks ago I met a GIS file from New York. We had some foreign keys in common and we started talking. He was so interesting and sophisticated! We’ve dated every week and had several long conversations. I was really beginning to fall for him, Aunty Poly, when suddenly last night he went all graphic on me! He started talking about table-joining with me, how some of my items were so mappable, how great I’d look in 16M colors, how he wanted to see my shape points, oh, Aunt Poly, I can’t repeat the rest! I was shocked! Aunt Poly, I don’t know what to do! Can I have a nice table relationship with him? Or is he just one of those polymorphic objects my parents warned me about?

For those who want to throw tomatoes or give kudos, I cannot take claim, I got these from a friend...

IT Generalists

Posted by Dave Smith On 6/10/2007 10:57:00 PM 1 comments

After combating on proposals for a few recent projects, I am getting a bit frustrated with the preponderance of IT generalist firms chasing after the same work we do. Seems there is still a notion out there that information technology is the solution to everything. Problem is, the reality is that IT in and of itself is not and will be a driver to compare with the actual business. And if the actual business requires understanding of geospatial analysis, or of geodesy and high-accuracy locational data, or of environmental science, or of transportation and congestion, then these are still the primary drivers.

Sure, you can hire some button pushers cheap... but will they really serve the need? Maybe, but most likely not. Will they display any thought leadership or vision? Definitely not. Is any of it meaningful to the IT generalists? No. Just butts in seats, generating revenue, quantity versus quality. Whatever happened to qualifications, domain expertise and past performance?

ESRI UC...

Posted by Dave Smith On 6/05/2007 09:24:00 PM 2 comments

Have not posted in some time, not that there's enough to talk about, but rather far too much - I frankly have been spending quite a bit of time on the road, between several trips to Research Triangle Park, NC, Washington DC, the EPA GIS Workgroup meeting in Boston, the NCEES Northeast Zone meeting in Newport, RI... have been home for a bare handful of days over the last month and a half, and any free minutes have been devoted to home and family, rather than the blog. A ton of interesting geospatial things going on, but unfortunately I can only talk about a few of them (though I hope to)...

And upcoming... finally sat down long enough to get my flight and hotel booked for the ESRI User Conference coming up in a couple of weeks. Looking forward to it... Arriving Sunday night, and am actually going to be in San Diego until Friday evening (!)... Would have preferred to leave Thurs night or Friday AM, but given availability of flights, it didn't work out - but this way I can do something for fun on Friday.

But hey! Looking forward to going to SD again this year!! Maybe I'll gin up a little "geoblogger" badge, so don't be afraid to say 'Hi' if you see me... I haven't yet even checked to see if there are any blogger meetups. I think there are several other extracurricular events planned as well, have a few invites but haven't yet even had a chance to sort them all out.

Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Exploring all aspects of mapping and geography, from field data collection, to mapping and analysis, to integration, applications development and enterprise architecture...

Geospatial Technology, End to End...

GIS TechnoGeekdom

Emergency Response and GIS

Letters to Aunt Poly

IT Generalists

ESRI UC...

Search

About Me

Blog Archive

Labels

Followers