Minutes of the 34th Quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting, held on November 8, 2017, from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm at Sandy City Hall (10000 Centennial Parkway) in Sandy. There were about 75 in attendance.
Business
Zlatko Grebenar, SLUG Board
Welcome to Sandy City. Thanks to Sandy for hosting and University of Utah for sponsoring the lunch.
This meeting’s lunch was sponsored by University of Utah. If you have any contacts that would be willing to ‘sponsor’ a lunch by providing food/ drinks in exchange for their advertising at the meeting, contact Tom Toronto, SLUG Board member.
The SLUG board welcomes a new member, Todd Turner from Tooele County.
Presentations
Hallie Johnson, Byers Engineering, Utilizing LIDAR data and GIS platforms to support remote design projects
Hallie talked about how LIDAR survey has improved data collection without the need for extensive ground field surveys. Some of the benefits are the ability to generate data as needed, verification and quality assurance offsets resource scarcity and high accuracy measurements. One of the main challenge that remains is getting a buy-in for this new technology in an old school industry.
Michael Duncan, Salt Lake County, Using the Data Assistant tool to aggregate community datasets
Michael showed a demo on using ArcGIS Pro and ESRI’s Data Assistant add-in to aggregate several datasets into a common schema, while each agency maintains their own data in their own schema. ESRI first marketed this tool for aggregating parcels and address points from different entities, but you can actually use this tool for any layer that needs aggregation. See ESRI's Community Parcels for more information. Follow instructions of his workflow here, or download the Data Assistant add-in here.
Emily Nicolosi, U of U Student, Participatory Mapping
Emily showed an example of a participatory map called “Utah Resilience Map”. The content of this map ranges from community gardens, innovative hubs to social justice groups. The map is open-sourced because community participation is vital. By adding groups or projects related to resilience will make it grow and show the needs of the community.
Dr. George Hepner, Department of Geography, What’s new in the Department of Geography’s GIS Offerings
Developing a B.S. degree in GIS, which will focus on GIS. The Geography department may start offering this new B.S. degree starting in the fall of 2018, pending approval. Construction on the new OSH building should be completed in a few years.
GIS Humor
Zlatko Grebenar, SLUG Board
High School Teacher rapping about Geography Test. You can see this clip here. You can see many of the videos we’ve shown (not including the above ones) at SLUG meetings on our own YouTube channel here.
Thank you to our presenters and our venue. If you have any ideas for a presentation or any other matter, please contact a SLUG board member. We appreciate your interest and support!