Active Web Maps - Whew!, It worked.

Setting up an active online web map takes effort and planning.  The more effort and planning on the front end the fewer times one needs to update, fix and redo the whole thing.   This week tied in very well with my intern experience at Middle Georgia Regional Commission, Macon, GA.     The Regional Commission's next major service venture is to be the "web publisher" for online maps of it's smaller county clients who do not have GIS or IT departments.  The field trip was to a local city office to demonstrate how the Regional Commission was publishing their local utility services to the public on the web using arcmap online map publishing services.  Our office set up a group, base map with editable data layers.   We demonstrated and trained the staff to edit their maps and update the physical location of water meters, grease traps and manholes using a personal ipad and iphone as the local gps device.  They edited the map by adding a point, it showed up in the system within a few minutes; their coworkers could see the point appear as a new attribute. Pop-ups were configured by MgRC with data attributes served as in house file folders for the city's data. We realized after 3-5 minutes of demonstration and practice that more administrative limits for editing and backups needed to be in place.   The more the parties practiced the more they realized most of their data was out of date and needed to be edited. oopps.

Our lesson this week was to add feature layers to an online map using csv files, photos, street scenes and general information.    Not much different than my field trip.  This time I was the one setting up the map, instead of watching.   Just as my supervisor said - the more planning and strategy set out in the front end resulted in fewer updates and edits.
Here's my map showing Evacuation routes from Tampa General Hospital. This represents the actual sceniero that they faced during the convention.





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Lab6 - Image Enhancement

Enhancing an image is more than a process, it's like art by mouse movements. Too quick, it blurs, too slow, it's black, just right, well it's nearly ok.  This image is a Landsat 7 which needed work. The original was a stripped thing which is not very pleasing.  The results of this exercise are acceptable but could still use a little work, but for the learning of it, well, ok.

It's through ERDAS>raster>Fourier>Fourier Transform Editor, then with the "wedge", next the LowPass (which either worked ok or didn't), next came Convolution filtering 3x3 sharp. Upon all of these, I took the image through a statistics filter with a 4.0 multiplier then adjust the histogram a bit. What a recipe!

Web Map Links, the US Poverty Map

Today I began exploring more web maps.  One of the ladies in the Council on Aging at the office asked a question about connecting the location of elderly with poverty and food sources.  This got me to thinking.  I entered the GIS program because our family circumstances were being dictated by employment events in the real estate sector.  If I could move out of a sector which will remain stagnant for several more years suppressing my own income, then I should in theory be able to get out of our poverty hole as well.  Looking at this map, our former area of residence is smothered over in poverty, ugly thoughts.

US Poverty Map

Just a note about the link above.  If you click on the brown words, click on individual state, it seems to work, sometimes. 

Digging out of the whole picture, takes more than a shovel. It takes a direction, determination and pure guts. Standing firm on a new foundation, towards a solid goal, with  grit, as someone said "Never Again."     So to answer the lady. Where are the poverty stricken elderly with no food, probably, next door.    Pictures are worth more than a thousand words.

Testing WebMaps. Hospital Evac Routes, Tampa

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Trying to get the web map to stay still long enough to edit it was the challenge.  I'm sure evacuating the patients from Tampa General to St. Joseph's and Memorial Hospital were easier than putting this web map on this blog.  Each time I tried to edit the map it danced around like a 3 year old.  Apparently, arcgis.com's web service is more sensitive than I expected.  Moving the mouse even slightly made the map redraw over and over and over and over. Urgh is the term, exasperated. Other wise, locating web maps is not difficult.  It does take some planning to retrieve the data and place it properly on the map.

 

Dream Job? Vague?

Working out there in the real world of GIS is an eye opener.   As the newbie GIS Intern with the Middle Georgia Regional Commission, I have the privilege of producing a map or two.    For many, your daily job consists of more gis tasks that I could imagine doing in a week.  

Our Regional Commission serves as the GIS technical department for 11 local counties, including
the cities within, their sheriff departments and any other department which has the need for a gis
product.  Many are too small to have staff or to justify the mapping software.  We have become the
web service for several of them; now serving as the mapping service and their public viewing web station of their tax parcels data instead of them using the old qpublic.net web service.

This is why this Planner/GIS Specialist caught my eye.   At the internship, many of the GIS (Techs) serve as pseudo planners with many of them having master degrees in planning or public administration. As part of their job they personally visit the county departments, visit on site for economic development ventures or any other project they are "mapping".  Personal interaction with the clients is a vital part of their positions.   They serve the people, helping others.
Although this job description does not mention personal interactions, it is the mission statement
of most planning/regional commissions to be interconnected with the people they serve.  Having the
GIS skills to produce map products for the visualization of the varied projects the counties need
assistance with is the technical icing.

Routes & Presentations

Presenting the network analyst routing can be a challenge.  Setting out separate sections nearly like a map book became more of a perfection quest.   Here are a couple maps, there may be another or two, I'll add later.

The gray scales for copying are an interesting concept.   Considering the convenience of our color copiers today, if in an emergency, the black & white are easier to mass produce.

There is also the individual routes for specific purposes: moving patients from one location to another.   Here's one of the hospital route maps,  These were actually placed into a trifold brochure for mass movements of persons, quickly across town.

There was an issue between the streets provided by the network analyst and the actual roads in mapquest or google for directions.   I took the liberty to add a corrective driving path, being the loop added.  Even though the roads were in network analyst, the program did not account for a one way loop and u-turn which most likely would not be allowed in a mass exit.  I editing and added the travel loop.   My directions on the brochure mentioned the presence of the u-turn but that authorities would not be allowing it.   Conforming street maps is an ever changing adventure. 

Peering down from space - IMAGINE What will I see next? ERDAS

It was green, no it was red, no I thought we could only see the blue.  Well, it's all of the above.  The launch of the LandSat series of satellites has brought to us "regular" people and enormous amount of information.   Seeing the earth not only from a spaceship as a little blue ball but from the trained lenses of the EMR perspective, a picture will no longer be just a thousand words but a thousand multispectral pixels.

We used a view of the entire conternounmas (?) United States. Zoomed in to Washington State then zoomed in yet again to a smaller area, subsetting and clipping to obtain the area on the map below.   This pick is compliments of an October 3, 2011, pass of a thematic mapper.  The base spectrum band combinations were changed and whow! it's better than magic crayons.  The preparation for the final product is not a 1,2,3, deal, it takes time and many more layered steps to obtain an understandable product.

Let's get out of HERE!, Learning Routes with Networks

Tampa Bay was covered in water for the convention.  It was a real thing, on real time TV.   Our module introduction to Network DataSets took the surge to task.  We established flood zones, flooded streets, restricted zones.   Locating routes for supplies from the Armory to shelters, evacuation routes,evacuation zones-- all helpful to the public.    Here's the map.  Next week we will do some analysis on our findings.