Piecing the Plots together: High-Accuracy cemetery GIS

It's safe to say that the smaller the block, parcel, or lot; the more difficult it can be to accurately represent your features in a GIS system.  When it comes to cemetery lots, this can be just the case as we start to go from feet to tenths to inches.  If your objective is to just locate a grave with respect to a certain area or section within the cemetery, then maybe a simple smart phone app searching for relative points may be all you need.  However, if you need to see the layout of lots, blocks, and graves, using polygons to identify specific graves (which may be the case for cemetery management tools) then high-accuracy GPS is the way to go.

This sample project consisted of collecting cemetery markers with a Trimble Geo-XH 6000 (cm Edition) GPS unit to obtain high-accuracy coordinates which were used as control points to lay out the blocks, lots, and graves or the cemetery.  Once the layout was completed, GIS data was populated from an existing database of information obtained from personnel responsible for managing the cemetery.  OK, so your next question is "where does the high quality imagery come from?".  Google??? NO, this was actually collected with a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV or commonly known as a drone) outfitted with GPS guidance and a professional grade camera.  You can read more about the drone project in separate upcoming blog.  The surrounding ground around the cemetery markers was painted with a white "X" to be used as ground control points when stitching the photos together.  The final map was served up as a feature service on ArcGIS Server and can be searched by last name using the magnifying glass search tool in the top right corner.  Notice how the head stones appear in the aerial image with precise accuracy over their designated grave polygon.  There will be more on these tools and methodology to come.

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Roanoke Apostolic Christian cemetery location...

ArcPad - Customized not Commercialized

When looking for a solution to better their data and increase productivity, the city of Rock Falls, Illinois did not want a box solution. A city that has owned its own utilities (Including electric) for over 100 years, they did not want to change what practices were working to fit into someones package. The electric department spearheaded the efforts to implement a field GIS that would allow workers to update, edit, and view data. After looking at data privacy and structure, it was soon realized that ESRI's ArcPad was going to be the best solution. 

ArcPad was decided upon for a few key reasons, but the ability to be customized to fit existing workflows made it the perfect solution. Because of offline editing, unique forms, and relationships, the city decided to pursue this unique route. 

The city is using Lenovo touch screen tablets running Windows 8.1, allowing them to have easy field functionality. Custom toolbars allow them to filter and sort layers and custom forms allow for data population. The unique forms allowed for the city's electric department to tie all the attributes to the pole layer to replicate existing utility workflows.

Overall, the use of custom ArcPad solutions greatly benefited the city. It allowed them to keep existing workflows while capturing better and current data. Time was spent upfront on custom programming of forms and buttons for ease of use, but keeping it simple is the best way to get the field crews to adapt to it. Complex box solutions might "do it all" but getting buy-in from all users is key to making the overall project a success for years to come.

Creating Line Features in the Field (Snap!)

Need to create line features in the field? Grab a tablet, the Collector App for ArcGIS supports point, lines and polygon creation and editing. Wait, but what about connectivity? If the lines are created on a touch screen device they are going to be as accurate as…well as drawing things with your finger, right? No worries. If you have ArcGIS for Desktop Standard, you have the Snap tool available to you, which will help you out. Once you’re done making your field additions, you can bring the data back into Desktop and run Snap to ensure coincidence of features. You could just consider it the most useful markup method ever. (!)

Ingredients

AGOL Organizational Acct

Editable Feature Service(s) accessible on AGOL

ArcGIS for desktop Standard

Mobile Device

Before & After The red line was created in the field with Collector on iPad. The blue line has been snapped to the poles layer using the gp tool:

Important:Ensure vertices are added at (or near) every coincidence location while creating line features, as you will need them later for this process.

Note: This method may be possible without Organizational Account/Collector but is very likely not near as fluid.

Doing Small Business using 'The Internet of Things'

If you haven't caught-up yet, The Cloud is over. 

What we expect these days is everything syncing, everything secure, everything available all the time. And when I say all the time, I mean At Any Second. Truly. 

It's not just us in tech that expect this. It's all of us together. The 1st World public at large. When we see commercials depicting pausing a movie in one room and moving to another to watch the rest, all without breaking stride or spilling the popcorn. That sets an expectation. Those professionals in Geospatial are used to this. Google has been setting public expectation for our industry for over 10 years. 

So... we at Cloudpoint are purveyors of these expectations as well as consumers. Here's what we use to do what we do as cost-effectively and efficiently as possible. (in order of adoption) 

Carbonite - Jon has been using Carbonite faithfully since his county engineer days. It's cloud-based mirroring backup system that has paid for itself ($70 year) time and time again in possible lost hours (See the DropBox note below). The first initial back-up takes a day or two but it's worth it in the end. 

QuickBooks Online - Cloudpoint is full of geospatial and engineering professionals, not MBAs and CPAs. QuickBooks Online helps us keep all of our finances in one place and lets us know what is important with it's canned reports and monthly metrics. At tax time you can give the keys to your accountant and everything is there for him to comb through. 

DropBox - Who isn't using dropbox.... anyone? Buehler? This is our workflow. We have a paid professional account that we all share. Most of our customers have a free version (or we create one for them) and then we "share" our project folder with that user. So when I RDP onto the Rock Falls server that .dbf of addresses is already sitting there. **One point of Note: while using ArcMap, it's best to pause the syncing, GIS files like to get corrupted if they're saving and syncing at the same time. 

AWS - In early 2012, Jon purchased ArcGIS Server and Micah (as a sub-contractor then) helped him put it onto an Amazon EC2 Server. Our relationship with Amazon Web Services was solidified. Now we use it as back-up, Image hosting license management and that machine is a part of our local network. the Up/Down Speeds do vary with they size of server, but that's something you can throttle and even pause.  It's one of our goals to learn and use more of what's available to us as a Service from Amazon. 

SquareSpace - This is a great company. Based out of NY, NY, it's our website hosting company. We pay for the middle-tier package for $16 a month. I spent about a week porting over all of our information to get the site up and running. A few months ago, before our yearly fees were due, I flirted with a few other companies/website services. Eventually, I just cleaned up the cobwebs a bit and the site feels fresh again. Their support is amazing as well. 

MerakiSystems Manager- Mobile Device Management. We rent iPads, or as we call them Mobile Data Collection Devices. Cisco purchased Meraki almost  year ago for their network and access point solutions. So they made the System Manager aspect free. I love free. This allows me to track, wipe, manage or lock any device before it leaves the building. The user interface and set-up is a little cumbersome, but did I mention it was free. 

Pertino - Best for last. I contacted this small startup about 9 months ago for a free trial. It's a cloud-based VPN service. Their company has grown in the last year and I'm glad to have been in on the start. I have already detailed the road traveled with this group. I gladly now pay for a monthly subscription to be able to print to the office printer, RDP to any computer on the network, directly share files, and see services (like an ArcGIS license manager) as if that computer was sitting next to me. Safe and Secure. 

Well That's it! Most of what Cloudpoint uses to fully channel the 'Internet of Things' . While certainly not an exhaustive list, (of course email, texting & the like) but fairly complete. I hope this helps someone who is looking to filter out the noise and just understand what everything is for. As I'm sure this list will grow in the future, I do feel like what I have here is honestly vetted and in practice. 

EF4 "Washington" Tornado Mapped

With all of this technology, With all of this knowledge with all of this progress, planning and pride, in the end, all we can do is stand and watch...then help rebuild after the storm. 

We really haven't been in the office too much this week. For obvious reasons. However thanks to the ease of ArcGIS Online and work of some other GIS folks in the area, we are able to set up this map depicting the relative path and some field verified points of destruction in the area. http://ow.ly/r49V0

Zoom Out to see the ESTIMATED Tornado Path and More areas Affected.

View Larger Map

Also *Special Shoutout to City of Pekin GIS and the OSM Volunteer Editors busy digitizing home footprints. 

The ArcGIS Marketplace (Maps & Apps)

Just wanted to keep everyone abreast on the latest information when it comes to ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Online applications.  

The ArcGIS Marketplace provides a way to access maps & apps from Esri, distributors, and partners.  The Marketplace contains both free and paid apps that are designed to help your organization access and share your GIS data seamlessly with either in-house staff or the public.  Similar to Apple's app store or Android apps found on Google Play, the ArcGIS marketplace is intended to be a one-stop shop for your Esri based mapping needs.