Spring Meeting Schedule

Presentation

With the introduction of ArcGIS.com, ArcGIS has become a complete system for creating, publishing, and sharing GIS data and services. This session will discuss and demonstrate the power of ArcGIS.com and show how it integrates with the desktop, server, cloud, and mobile components of ArcGIS.

Presentation

Over these past twenty years technology choices and the launch of a number of high profile Web sites have shaped the growth and adaptation of the use of the internet for business, government and consumer applications including Web-based mapping. This talk will review the importance of the design process, design trends, the role of graphic designers, and integration with Web development tools such as Drupal and WordPress. The presentation will also highlight some of the leading practices and options available today — tile vs. dynamic caching, plug-ins vs. no plug-ins — that drive design and affect deployment of GIS on the Web.

Presentation

Similar to parcel data, master address reference points are a key data layer for municipal government. Master address reference points are critical to work flows in many departments: planning, assessing, building & permitting, public safety, public works, etc. It is often the case, however, that no single department has responsibility for, or control over, the entire workflow of address data creation and maintenance. The result is that this critical data is sometimes incomplete or not up to date. One solution to this problem is a Web-based address point creation and maintenance capability that allows multiple departments to securely add, edit, and review address points according to their roles and responsibilities for address data. The Town of West Hartford, Connecticut was an early adopter of this approach. Through this approach, the capture of address point locations is now a part of the workflow of several departments, each having different levels of access to the data and roles assigned to the participants at each step in the process (create, edit, approve, and so forth). The address maintenance application is also being integrated into the Town’s permitting system, CityView, via consumption of Web services and stored procedures. This presentation will review the development of this integrated approach and Web-based system, identify obstacles overcome in the process, and illustrate or demonstrate the current application.

Presentation

The Census Bureau is moving to a new format for most of its demographic and economic data, starting with the 2010 Decennial Census. This hands-on workshop will help you get oriented to the future of census data.

Presentation

Much as in 1891 Albrecht Penck organized a transnational program to map the world at 1:1,000,000 scale, Esri is hosting a transnational effort to map the world at scales down to 1:1000 in urban areas. Community maps are compiled from authoritative sources and stored as image caches in the "cloud" for free usage in desktop, Web and mobile environments. The Community Maps Program is expanding and changing based on experience and user feedback. This presentation gives a snapshot of the current program and the directions in which it's moving.

Presentation

Over the past winter Cambridge GIS has updated most of the components of our enterprise GIS, which serves over 40 desktop users, Web applications, and also ties into several other enterprise systems such as work order management, CAMA, and the master address database. We will review the planning and implementation of these upgrades and discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly things that can happen when you change nearly everything at once in a fairly large program.

Some of the items included in the upgrade were:

• Choosing and configuring a new database server.
• Upgrading SQL Server from 2000 to 2008.
• Upgrading ArcGIS Desktop, Server, and SDE from version 9.3.1 to 10.
• Incorporating new basemap layers from our spring 2010 flyover.
• Changing the data schema and name for virtually every GIS layer.

We will also show how a custom in-house repathing tool helped with the data migration, and how we trained and assisted desktop GIS users during the transition.

Presentation, First Part
Presentation, Second Part

The Northeastern Connecticut Council of Governments (NECCOG) has implemented their ArcGIS Server in the Amazon Web Services cloud. NECCOG also contracted with Fountains Spatial to develop a configurable Flex viewer that will consume the cloud based AGS services for the twelve NECCOG member towns. Mark will discuss the process of getting ArcGIS Server up and running in the cloud and Larry will discuss the nuances of building and configuring a Flex application to consume cloud based GIS services.

Presentation

In order to make more efficient work of our GIS tasks many of us are learning to automate our GIS workflows. This presentation will touch on some of the tools available to automate your workflows and share a few pitfalls. Guido Stein has been training to be a GIS snake charmer for the last decade and is always willing to share what he has learned.

Presentation

The Town of Amherst uses iPhones & iPads to access GIS content via the ArcGIS for iOS app. Access to linked documents and Web-based forms produce a very rich experience with this app. We'll take a brief look at how this works and the role of arcgis.com in making this possible.

Presentation

A new map of solar potential for New York City is scheduled for release later this year. This talk reviews the strategies used for processing newly acquired lidar data for the five boroughs, for estimating solar potential and usable roof area for each building in the city, and for providing on-the-fly estimates of solar potential for user-defined areas. This talk will review some geoprocessing strategies used for a new map of solar energy potential for New York City.

This project is the result of an innovative collaboration between Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) Green Jobs Career Exploration and UMass Boston’s GIS Lab. The goal was to introduce the students to geospatial technologies. Students analyzed the equitability of check cashers vs. ATM/Banking locations in two Boston neighborhoods using GIS & GPS and learned the benefit of spatial analysis via overlay mapping and ArcGIS spatial analysis. In the future, GIS classes and training opportunities will be available to a larger number of alternative high school youth in Boston. Database- and XML-driven apps just make sense. Why build an app using a custom or proprietary configuration when that configuration itself may have a much longer life than the app that is built upon it? We’ll take a quick at how a database-driven application configuration can work and how it has the potential to provide greater scalability, fewer headaches, and a common link for those who are more comfortable in a database than in a sea of obscure code.

Presentation

An intrepid member of the audience agrees to tell a story about a stack of seemingly unrelated slides, with hilarious results!

Presentation

With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Trinity College and the Map and Geographic Information Center (MAGIC) at UConn Libraries have teamed up to create a public history Web-book, titled On the Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and its Suburbs. This digital hybrid tells the story of schooling and housing boundary lines that have divided metropolitan Hartford, Connecticut over the past century, as well as the struggles of ordinary families and civil rights activists who have sought to cross over, redraw, or erase these lines.

The presentation will feature student generated work showing neighborhood change on aerial photographs from 1934 to present using Google Maps API an open-source Web-mapping platform. A linked-control dual view aerial map allows the user to zoom and pan between 1934 aerial maps and more recent aerial maps in adjacent windows and the ability to search for addresses in Connecticut. This tool allows the user to see Connecticut's changing land use patterns and how interstate highway development changed the urban makeup of Connecticut cities and the transformation of rural farmland into residential and commercial areas over the last 60 years.

The Web-book platform enables visitors to write comments and offer feedback on the draft text and digital features. Learn more at http://OnTheLine.trincoll.edu. Join us as we explore technologies that you can use to blend maps with content.

Presentation

Have you heard the terms Risk MAP and HAZUS thrown about, but what is it all about? Risk MAP is FEMA plan for building upon the products created from Flood Map Modernization program with a key element on identifying risk. Hazus is FEMA methodology for estimating potential losses from various disaster scenarios. Join us as we dive into a brief discussion about the new Risk MAP products, and how Hazus is a key part of these new studies.

Presentation

This spring Amherst College offered an experimental tutorial to introduce students to research methods in urban history and educational policy, focusing on the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts and its School Committee's “Controlled Choice” approach to desegregation. The students read extensive background material, visited archives, researched primary sources, and conducted oral interviews. A large part of the class was learning to apply GIS to help them understand the importance of spatial relationships to the subject matter. This talk will summarize the lessons they learned and highlight some of their results.

Presentation

The latest releases of ArcGIS extend the reach of your GIS by including mapping apps for Tablet PCs, Windows Smartphones, and Apple iOS devices. This session will present topics on leveraging and updating spatial information from your choice of device platform.

Pelch Presentation
Goetz Presentation
Jacqz Presentation

This panel represents most of the governments in the Northeast and will describe the "state of the States".

Presentation

Hazus is a nationally applicable standardized methodology that contains models for estimating potential losses from earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. Hazus uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology and runs on an ArcGIS platform to estimate physical, economic, and social impacts of disasters. It graphically illustrates the limits of identified high-risk locations due to earthquake, hurricane, and floods. Users can then visualize the spatial relationships between populations and other more permanently fixed geographic assets or resources for the specific hazard being modeled, a crucial function in the pre-disaster planning process. Increasingly, Hazus is being used by states and communities in support of risk assessments, to perform economic loss scenarios for certain natural hazards, and rapid needs assessments during hurricane response. Other communities are using Hazus to increase hazard awareness.

The presentation will detail what is Hazus, how to access it, where to find training and how to get involved with other Hazus users in New England as well as nationally. You will also learn about the many uses of Hazus with a focus on how to use it for mitigation planning.

Presentation

It's a brave new world out there. With a steady stream of mobile devices coming on the market and advancements in mobile operating systems and GIS technologies, users now have a seemingly endless number of options for providing data to citizens, customers, and a mobile work force.

During this presentation trends in mobile technologies will be reviewed and demonstrated. This will include methods and options for implementing GIS applications on iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Trimble Juno and Yuma devices, and ToughBooks. In addition, options for collecting data with these devices will also be reviewed along with trends for developing custom mobile solutions and leveraging ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS.com for feeding data to mobile devices.

The purpose of the project is to gather mobile-device-generated data from the Smith community and to generate an artistically pleasing visualization of paths. Processing the data using mathematical methods, we will be able to provide statistical insight into the use of campus facilities by different student subgroups.

The Mill River Watershed covers over 33,000 acres (52 mi²) of western Massachusetts, and has exerted a significant influence over the ecology, history, and settlement patterns within its borders. Since the early 1640s the Mill River and its tributaries have provided local industry with a cheap and accessible power source. The purpose of this project was to map industrialization of the Mill River Watershed, and to collect information into a GIS database that could then be used to assess the impact of local industry on long-term landscape change. 200 years of historic maps were georeferenced in ArcGIS. Because maps varied greatly both in accuracy and in detail, maps were compared with local industrial histories. This poster charts industrial growth and changes in power source from 1831 to 1895 at three sites along the Mill River: The Nonotuck Mill site, Paper Mill Village, and the Upper Mill dam.

Escherichia coli live in the intestines of living things. Once excreted, E. coli can only survive in nutrient-rich conditions, such as waterways or host organisms. High E. coli concentrations in streams pose a risk to human health.

Our research compares E. coli concentrations to land use. We hypothesize that E. coli levels will be highest in streams running through agricultural areas; middle range data will be in the urban sites and the lowest E. coli levels will be in the forested sites. Streams in agricultural land will have the highest levels of E. coli due to high concentrations of manure from animal grazing and land applications. Urban sites will show a slightly lower level of E. coli due to the impervious surfaces that do not allow for percolation of water into the soil. Forested land will have the lowest levels of E. coli because water is easily absorbed into its landscape.

As participants in the Vermont EPSCoR Streams Project, we, along with the other participants, took water samples from streams around Vermont. These water samples were sent to UVM to be tested for the E. coli levels. E. coli data was retrieved from 12 streams in the Streams Project database with a date range of July to August 2010. The date range allowed for a controlled variable in our analysis by eliminating seasonal weather variability. Using datasets from a number of internet resources and Esri ArcGIS software, a map was created collating the information of the varying land uses surrounding stream samples. We then compared the E. coli concentrations to the land use to determine if our hypothesis is correct. By averaging datasets, we saw that forested streams had the lowest levels of E. coli, urban streams had slightly higher amounts of E. coli and Agricultural streams had the highest levels of E. coli.

See: http://www.uvm.edu/~streams/

Walking the Network

Using Washington, D.C., as a case study, I demonstrate a methodology for measuring walkability in an urban environment based on the density of walkable destinations using network distance. Along with increased interest in walkable neighborhoods for compact urban design and public health have come numerous methods for quantifying walkability. Most existing methods use straight-line distances for ease of calculation, combined with indirect measures of network connectivity such as street node density. My method incorporates a direct measure of connectivity by using network distance, but saves computation time by calculating distances around a discrete number of destinations rather than distances out from many possible origin points. The method generates a raster grid of the walkability score. The versatile output raster can be used for visualization, or added as an attribute to points, such as addresses, or to areas, such as Census blocks, for statistical analysis. Using 18 destination types each with a relevant distance of 400 or 800 meters along a street centerline network, I demonstrate the method to create a walkability density surface for Washington, D.C., with a 5 meter grid. As a further demonstration of the potential for analysis, I aggregate scores by Census block and compare walkability to several demographic measures including race and household income.

This ground plan of the Harvard University campus represents the core GIS data used for University maps and analyses to support communication, planning, facility management, and decision making. It is made accessible to the Harvard community through shared network access and our online map at: http://map.harvard.edu.

The data compilation is based on 1”=40’ scale aerial mapping performed by Infotech, Inc. This data has been modified by staff by utilizing ground surveys and field verification. The hardscape represented here is the most recently developed GIS layer, containing 5 categories and 15 sub-categories of impervious surfaces.