The 18th quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting was held on November 6, 2013, from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm at the DNR in SLC. There were about 75 in attendance.
Business
Ray Montgomery, SLUG Board
Welcome to all, thanks to Sandy City for the venue.
This was a brown-bagger. 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 a SLUG Board member.
The next SLUG meeting will be February 12th at the University of Utah. The May 14th meeting is scheduled for AGRC, and the August 13th meeting will be at a facility new to us- the IMC medical center in Murray. Hope to see you all at those!
Presentations
James Wingate, Blue Stakes, Using Address Points and Parcels to Enhance Blue Stakes Operations
James did a fascinating live demo of how Blue Stakes processes the requests for their services. He showed how they are beginning to use address points, parcels, and centerlines to improve their process to find locations and find which agencies must be notified if a ‘Dig’ is to occur.
Bert Granberg, AGRC Director, Sharing Data, Data Quality
Bert talked about setting goals, developing shared tools, and measuring progress with respect to the data quality of address points, parcels, and centerlines. These resources are being used in more and more business processes (important ones...blue stakes tickets, local, regional and state dispatch centers, crash and citation reporting/analysis and in the elections databases, just to name a few.) Lots of core government functions and public safety are relying on the data for service delivery.
Bert made this a discussion about possibly forming a workgroup to develop integrated criteria and analyze the data. Could we do a data quality heat map for single criteria and combined criteria? See Bert's Presentation.
Jake Petersen, Sandy City Public Works GIS Coordinator, Python Add-Ins for Beginners
Jake explained how at ArcGIS 10.0 ESRI introduced Add-Ins for ArcGIS. These Add-Ins allowed you to create custom tools and buttons that can be distributed and installed with ArcGIS very easily. However, these first versions had to be developed with .NET or Java which was a little intimidating. When ESRI released ArcGIS 10.1 they introduced Python Add-Ins. The simplicity of Add-Ins combined with easy to learn Python makes for a very good combination. Jake went over how to create an Add-In, starting at the beginning and ending with a new button. He also demonstrated some custom buttons in a toolbar that he developed for Sandy City GIS. See Jake's Presentation.
GIS Humor
Ray Montgomery, Sandy City GIS Administrator
Ray showed a funny video about some of the bizzareness along the US- Canadian border. 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 and our venue. And thanks for your interest and support!