The 21st quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting was held on August 13, 2014, from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm in the Auditorium of the Doty Education Center (Bldg 6) on the IMC Campus in Murray. There were about 120 in attendance.
Business
Ray Montgomery, SLUG Board
Welcome to all, thanks to IMC for providing the venue and to UGIC for sponsoring the lunch.
This meeting’s lunch was pizza and veggies, mostly funded by UGIC. Our sincere thanks to UGIC for sponsoring! If you have any business contacts that would like to ‘sponsor’ a lunch by providing food and drinks in exchange for their advertising at the meeting, please contact Tom Toronto, SLUG Board member.
The next SLUG meeting willl be at the U of U on Thursday November 20th. Hope to see you there!
We are always in need of presenters. If you would like to present, or sugggest someone who you’d like to see present, please contact Neal Fraser, SLUG Board member.
Presentations
Before starting, Steve Kollman, Sr GIS Analyst at Murray, asked the audience questions about Murray City history, government, and events, such as “what year were the big smokestacks torn down?”. Those who could answer them received a nice 3” earth globe stamped with the Murray City logo, “Murray City GIS”, and a link to their main map page at www.murraymaps.org. About 8 globes were given away.
Janie Richardson, GIS Manager, Overview of Murray City GIS
Janie gave a brief history of Murray City, and an overview of how GIS is used in the day to day operations of city government. She explained how GIS is supporting such functions as Utility Management, Public Safety, Planning, Customer Service, Public Works, Parks, Schools, etc. See Janie’s presentation materials here.
Matt McQuiston, Sr GIS Analyst, GIS in Murray City Water, Sewer, and Stormwater
Matt McQuiston provided a more detailed demonstration of what is involved in maintaining sewer, water and storm water utilities, and how GIS is used to perform some of the necessary functions. He explained how Murray has moved many of their maintenance and inspection tasks from manual paper forms to mobile applications. See Matt’s presentation materials here.
Dave Henrie, UGIC Board, UGIC Announcement
Dave announced the 2015 UGIC Conference, “UGIC-GeCo of the West”. Every 5 years, it’s Utah’s turn to host the Regional user group conference (now GeCo West) in conjunction with the UGIC conference. So Utah GIS people will attend as well as people from Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. This conference will be held May 11-15, 2015 at Snowbird Resort. Check out the special conference activities and learn more about it HERE. Registration will open this winter.
Rick Chapman, Sr GIS Analyst, GIS Use in Managing Street Signs
Rick talked about how GIS is used to maintain street signs and pavement markings for the City, and gave a demonstration of a mobile application he uses to conduct an annual “Sign Reflectability Survey”. He showed actual street signs in various stages of aging. See Rick’s presentation materials here.
Ben Teran, Sr GIS Analyst, Murray GIS web mapping
Ben outlined the process of taking legacy GIS and Enterprise data and making it readily available to City leaders, City employees and the public through the implementation of web maps, and specifically a City Basemap. He demonstrated how to create a link to Google Street View, enabling a viewer to zoom to street view at a specific location, by clicking it on the map. He also showed how he has taken a manual paper service order process and automated it, displaying real time power outages and forestry maintenance activities. See Ben’s presentation materials here.
GIS Humor
Ray Montgomery, SLUG Board
Ray showed a clip from the TV series MacGyver- imagine what HE could do with a map! See the video here, or check out our Geography Humor page where most of the humor videos we have shown at SLUG meetings can be accessed.
Thank you to our presenters, sponsor, and our venue. And thanks for your interest and support!