GISi AG4LG Deployment

January 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

We at GISi have been very happy with our client successes using GISi HealthCheck and GISi ArcGIS 4 Local Government (AG4LG)  jumpstart toolkit.  Most recently, the GISi & the City of Southfield, MI GIS group has been working diligently to implement Esri’s AG4LG information model into the City’s existing Enterprise GIS infrastructure.  The City has adopted the newly released common information model, core GIS tools, templates, and applications to help the City improve operations and communicate more effectively with the public while saving both time and money.

We are very excited that Southfield has joined our client, Effingham County, GA, to become one of the first communities in the country to truly embrace the new information model, applications and services being provided by GISi & Esri. The work GISi and the City have been doing in the AG4LG space has already generated a wealth of positive word of mouth throughout the region.

The City of Southfield GIS group has deployed the apps and maps gallery template: Destination Southfield and three applications; “GISi Silverlight Template Viewer”, “Polling Places”, “Parks & Rec Finder” and the City plans to have many more apps added in the coming months.

The GISi Silverlight Template Viewer application provides a wealth of geospatial information to its residential and business community, supporting public service delivery 24/7.  The City and GISi migrated its current WebADF application to the ArcGIS Server 10 platform using Microsoft Silverlight™ version 4.  Resources like the City’s Internet Mapping Portal reflect the type of investments Southfield is making to ensure a vibrant business climate exists.  This site helps promote the growth of existing business and attract new investments into the city while providing vital information to its citizens. Residents and nonresidents alike are able to view property ownership, zoning, voting districts, refuse and recycling information and many more commonly used data layers.

The Election Polling Places application helps citizens locate their election polling place and obtain information about current elected officials. This application is typically used by citizens during an election season, but can be used throughout the year to determine which elected official represents the precinct they reside in. To locate a polling place, simply click on the map or enter an address in the search box. The polling place and respective voting precinct will then be highlighted on the map and relevant information about the polling place and elected officials will be presented in two tabs at the bottom of the application. The application will also provide directions from the searched address to the associated polling place location.

The Park and Recreation Finder application helps residents locate a park and obtain information about recreation activities in their community. This application is typically used by residents in a community, but can be used by visitors to locate a park or recreation area near them, or one that offers the activity they are interested in. To locate a park, simply enter an address or activity in the search box. The park(s) or recreation area(s) will then be highlighted on the map and relevant information about available recreation activities are presented to the user.

The City now plans to release new applications on a consistent basis over the upcoming months. Sally Price feels the release of these applications will offer significant value to both City of Southfield staff as well as its citizens.  The City is using the GISi HealthCheck prescription to guide these future apps.

I would like to thank everyone at Esri who made this implementation possible through education and commitment to the success of our clients, to the GISi staff (Steve Gogola, Sean Savage & Christopher Fricke) and Sally Price sprice@cityofsouthfield.com.

GISi will soon be deploying AG4LG apps to ArcGIS online, visit: http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=881d4967817241db818795135a12ab09

For more information on the GIS HealthCheck, visit http://www.GISHealthCheck.com

For more information on AG4LG, visit: http://resources.arcgis.com/content/local-government/about

For a link to Destination Southfield, visit: http://maps.cityofsouthfield.com/destinationsouthfield/

For more information on the GISi Silverlight Template Viewer, contact sales@gisinc.com and try it live: http://maps.cityofsouthfield.com/GISViewer/

For more information on Elections Polling Place Template, visit: http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=14290c7441b34ea984ad9310f4cf6435 and try it live: http://maps.cityofsouthfield.com/Apps/Elections/PollingPlaces/

For more information on the Park and Recreation Finder Template, visit: http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=734512384d3b4b849aba2db0e33a80f2 and try it live: http://maps.cityofsouthfield.com/Apps/Recreation/ParkFinder/

Filed under Clients & Projects, Industry Insights Tagged with , , , ,

The GIS Paradigm Shift

January 5, 2012 by 2 Comments

Call me a GIS sociologist. Or historian. Or whatever. I’ve been around this business long enough to have watched things evolve. If that doesn’t make you feel old, I don’t know what will. At any rate, I like to consider the state of our industry today and discuss some of the ideas that float around on occasion. One of my favorite topics is the paradigm shift in the GIS industry. How GIS professionals have changed over the last 4 decades or so.

In the beginning, there were scientists. Remember we are talking GIS, okay? The scientists were trying to figure out how do analyses with these cool computer things and apply that to maps and spatial questions. Those smart scientists started developing computer applications to help them do their day jobs. GIS was an applied science. One guy could do it all. The GIS guy.

Fast forward a few years and those GIS guys began migrating away from their scientific day jobs, because, well, GIS was just so cool! They began to see how GIS could be applied to a wide variety of problems, not only scientific, but economic, demographic and sociological avenues. It could be used as a real differentiator in understanding and solving business problems.

We started seeing the GIS guy get stretched thin on his ability to know it all, but most of them could still do it, and most of them still started somewhere else before they came to be the GIS professional.

Then, something happened. In conjunction with the rapid development in desktop computing power, application of GIS in scientific and demographic communities, the GIS guy became a specialist who actually went to school to become a GIS guy. We needed it to be that way, and so the paradigm of the GIS professional shifted. It is analogous to what happened in the broader computer science industry 2 decades earlier. The mathematicians and engineers who adopted computers and were the early programmers were replaced by the computer science graduates who specialized in all sorts of areas in the “computer science” industry.

The thing that fascinates me about the paradigm shift is how quickly it seemed to happen. Can we look to the broader computer science landscape and see what is possible with GIS? Are we already there? Have we simply been absorbed into computer science as a niche market or are we something altogether different? The old scientist in me says the latter, but I could be convinced otherwise.

Filed under Industry Insights Tagged with

Towards a High Performance Line of Sight Tool

December 15, 2011 by 2 Comments

We have a number of ArcObjects-based applications that require thousands to tens of thousands of Line of Sight Analyses to run to obtain the desired output.  As part of a Research and Development project I was looking for alternate ways of achieving the same result but allow us to optimize performance and have access to finer grained control of the underlying analysis. The following is a description of what I found with the ArcObjects code and the beginning of an alternative solution.

ArcObjects is thread-safe, but some of ArcObject’s operations lock out concurrent processing to ensure thread safety.

I discovered this fact while working on an algorithm that performs several calls to ISurface::GetLineOfSight.  After profiling the algorithm, I discovered that the line of sight operation was the algorithm’s bottleneck.  To get more speed, I multi-threaded the algorithm.  The result was unexpected: The algorithm took twice as long to process and required twice as much processing power.

I came to the conclusion that I needed to write my own line of sight algorithm.

After a bit of research, I decided to use a Triangle-Ray Intersection technique (used by some ray tracing methods).  The method requires converting the surface to a collection of 3D triangles.  To determine the intersection point, search through the triangle collection for an intersection with the ray.

(Source: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs465/2003fa/homeworks/raytri.pdf)

The reason to use triangles is that the math becomes much simpler (and faster).  In fact, there are no computationally complex (and slow) mathematical operations.  Take a look at the code:

Granted, the math is complex, but the math isn’t computationally complex.  The above method, “flattens” the surface and then determines the intersection of the triangle’s plane with the ray.  The PointInTriangle method then determines if the intersection point is inside the triangle.

The way the PointInTriangle method works is by checking which “side” of each of the triangle’s lines the point is on.  If the point is outside of the triangle, the point will be on the left side of 2 of the lines, and on the right of the other (1: Left, 2: Left, 3: Right).  If the point is inside of the triangle, the point will be on the same side of each line.

So far, my implemented version is 10x slower, but just as accurate as the ArcObjects line of sight operation (the trick is to use the same points to build the triangle collection).  But not to worry, there is plenty of room for improvement.

Currently, the triangles are stored in a 2D array.  A more efficient data structure will greatly improve performance.  Another positive note is that this implementation is thread-safe and doesn’t lock out concurrent processing.

This implementation can be modified for GPU processing.  Using a GPU technique, every triangle can be checked for intersection at the same time.

In conclusion, there is a lot of potential using GPUs to perform line of sight operations.  Transferring the surface’s data to the GPU is a relatively considerable investment (about 2-3 ms).  Luckily, when performing thousands of line of sight operations, the data transfer happens only once at the beginning.  Compared to ArcObjects running on a single thread, we can expect to see at least a 14 times speed up.  This means an algorithm that previously took an hour to run could potentially run in 4 minutes.

It took a bit of research to determine a good method of implementation.  Luckily there were several sources out there to read and use:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs465/2003fa/homeworks/raytri.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-plane_intersection

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/graphics/Simple_Ray_Tracing_in_C_2.aspx

http://t-ray.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ORayTracer/RayTracer/tTriangle.cs

Filed under Industry Insights, Our Take on Technologies Tagged with , , ,

Esri Mid-Atlantic User Group Conference Recap: Part 2

December 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

I was glad to join Christopher at the Esri Mid-Atlantic User Group Conference outside of Baltimore recently.  It’s very exciting to step outside of the daily routine once in a while to learn about the future and direction of the GIS industry, be inspired by work that our colleagues are doing, and to talk about some of the work GISi has been engaged in.

Like Christopher mentioned, integration was certainly a buzz word tossed around a fair amount.  Demos given during the main session talks showed how a user could fairly easily push maps and data from ArcGIS Desktop to ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS online.  As Clint Brown, Director of Software Products at Esri, was casting vision for the future of ArcGIS, he liked to refer to ArcGIS as a system.  To paraphrase, “What is ArcGIS?  It is a system that enables people to work with your online maps and associated geographic info.”  It would seem that Esri’s heavy investment in cloud technology (in the form of ArcGIS Online) is the key to the advancement of this vision.

In line with this vision is the idea that maps are windows into our data.  Maps are way more than a way to find directions from A to B.  Thanks to Google, the general public is familiar with the idea of using a map to explore data from the world around them.  Esri wants to harness this general population spatial awareness.  Again, Clint Brown: “Everyone knows how to use a map.  The map is the window into everything else GIS related.  It is one of the most universally recognized ways to present information.”  He encouraged us to think of new ways to use the map as a window into our respective organization’s business data.

Like Christopher mentioned in his previous post, the Esri MUG was a very inspirational event.  In addition to the array of fine user presentations, I was particularly inspired by the recipient of the First MUG Community Service Award, Dr. Jay Morgan of Towson University.  This man has used his career to increase the public’s awareness of GIS and how it can be used to create a better world.  He inspired us to find ways to volunteer in the community and transfer our passion for GIS to the next generation.

Filed under Industry Insights Tagged with ,

Esri Mid-Atlantic User Group Conference Recap: Part 1

December 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

This year’s Esri Mid-Atlantic User Group (MUG) Conference was located just north of Baltimore City in Hunt Valley, Maryland.  Having grown up in Northern Maryland and attended UMBC, this conference was a little bit like heading home for me.  I ran into a number of former classmates and colleagues from across the state of Maryland and really enjoyed “geeking out” about the innovative work we have been doing over the years.

If I could choose one buzz word to describe the future of GIS it would be Integration. With Esri’s upcoming 10.1 release and increasing push into cloud infrastructures, it is becoming easier to push data developed in ArcGIS Desktop to map services hosted by ArcGIS online, that feed applications hosted on a webserver to clients anywhere in the world.  It is a different concept than what I am used to.  I think Clint Brown said it best when he proclaimed ArcGIS Online the Flickr of GIS.

In addition to integrating a number of their software products, it sounds like Esri has invested a lot of time simplifying the everyday maintenance of their ArcGIS Server and ArcSDE products.  ArcGIS Server is getting a total make over, dropping support for DCOM connections and trimming down the number of installed users from three to one.  Also, I really like the incorporation of more Database Administration tools into ArcCatalog.  Hopefully gone are the days of cracking open SQL management studio to manage users.

I was left really inspired by this year’s MUG.  There were a bunch of presentations that showed the increasing role that GIS plays in disseminating information to typically non-GIS users.  The Flex Site the Baltimore City Fire Department set up for emergency responders working the Grand Prix showcased how GIS can be used to help dispatchers make decisions on the fly in a rapidly changing environment.   I also thought the model the National Capital Region Geospatial Data Exchange utilized to distribute data between local governments, private industry and non-profits was really innovative.  Silos of data are nice and all, but real information comes when multiple data is shared throughout the community.

Filed under Industry Insights Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.