The 13th quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting was held on August 6th, 2012, from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm at the Deprtment of Natural Resources (DNR) building in Salt Lake City. There were about 140 in attendance. SBR sponsored the lunch for this meeting.
Business
Ray Montgomery, SLUG Board
Thanks to DNR for the use of the facility, and to SBR for sponsoring the lunch.
Ray presented some results from the recent survey of SLUG members, indicating the most-desired topics. The survey results should be available soon on the SLUG website.
The next SLUG meeting will be held Novemver 13, 2012 at the Salt Lake County Millcreek complex. Details to follow; please mark this on your calendars.
Dave Henrie gave a brief description of the next UGIC conference, which will be in March in Provo.
Eric Edgely gave a plug for DNR, explaining a bit about what they do and how they are organized.
We are always in need of Presenters, Sponsors, and Venues. Please contact a SLUG Board member to volunteer.
Jeff Holley, SBR
SBR explained that SBR provides all kinds of document printing, all sizes, from business cards to billboards. They also suppy plotters and related supplies. Please consider them when you need such services.
Presentations
Kasey Hansen –Gateway Mapping, ArcPy for ArcGIS 10- Using Python to Automate your GIS
Kasey took us through applications he’s built for 3 agencies using Python. These are added to ArcMap as toolbars and buttons to simplify several tasks.
For a county in Idaho, he demonstrated drawing a project boundary, and then automatically generating the relevant map book pages that touch or lie within the boundary. His app can also to split parcels, automatically changing their areas, and launching another project focused on the area being edited.
A secondary water canal company in Utah had been using MS Access to take in work orders, then printing these, then coding into GIS from the paper print. He automated this process, so that the manual error-prone steps were removed. It utilizes an online geocoding service to locate the addresses, and can export to KML for use in Google Earth.
For a city in Washington state, he used both model builder and Python to automate and simplify their traffic count operations. This app loads data from a non-GIS source, then locates the places, creates a new FGDB, exports the feature class to it, and creates a shaded analysis map.
Rick Kelson – Utah AGRC (Automated Geographic Reference Center), The Utah Statewide Raster Inventory and Distribution
Rick explained and showed the problems that AGRC has in managing their raster, contour, and LiDAR collections. Currently a bit disorganized, each type of data has it’s own challenges. They have many providers and overlapping requests for new data from multiple agencies with different needs. In addition, each raster dataset contains differing details such as accuracy, dates, resolution, and so forth.
AGRC found there was not a clear inventory of what raster data is available for the State of Utah. As the various types of raster data become more valuable to a broader range of industries, AGRC has worked to play a significant role in creating partnerships throughout the community of users to acquire more raster data to meet user’s needs.
Utilizing the power of ESRI products, an SDE database was constructed and a REST web application was developed to assist people in Utah to not only find out what raster data was available for their area of interest but to allow them to download the data. Check this out at raster.utah.gov to find and sort the AGRC raster data.
Scott Davis – Utah AGRC (Automated Geographic Reference Center), Utah’s Wildlife- Vehicle Collision Reporting System
Recently, the Utah Automated Geographic Reference Center (AGRC) Development Group has been working on a project for recording roadkill carcasses that have been picked up by state workers or contractors. The solution includes a mobile HTML5 web application for submitting reports and a desktop web application for viewing and analyzing the data. The mobile app includes features like automatic geolocation using GPS and offline reporting capabilities. The desktop application includes a map viewer with various filtering capabilities, the ability to print the map, or download the data as a shapefile or dbf.
Scott’s presentation took us through the various technologies that were used in this project including: HTML5 offline cache manifests, HTML5 local-storage, ArcGIS Server Feature Services, Dojo, jQuery Mobile, Wienre remote JavaScript debugger, ESRI's JavaScript API, Twitter's Bootstrap library, and custom Python geoprocessing web services through ArcGIS Server. It touched on the lessons learned, mistakes made and how all of these different technologies worked together to provide a great solution.
GIS Humor
Ray Montgomery, Sandy City
Ray showed a short video from Google explaining their new product, “Google Maps 8-bit for NES (Nintendo)”. The video demonstrated how to use it to see Google maps in glorious 8 color pixely format! This was a video prepared by Google to go with their April Fool’s gag earlier this year. View it here: LINK. Please see our Geography Humor page where all the humor videos we have shown at SLUG meetings can be accessed.
To our presenters, sponsor, and our venue, “Thank you!” And thank you for your interest and support!