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GIS Cooperative Meeting

City of Tucson - Information Technology

Friday March 9, 2001

10:00 AM - Noon

Present: Donald Ijams, Dave Hochede, Mike Honomichl, Anna Sanchez, Larry Cassen, Steve Whitney, Dan Falkner, Kristi Jenkins, Ves Zinn, John Keefer, Jack Avis, Bryn Enright, and Bob Czaja

CityScan Prototype

Dave Hochede demonstrated the current CityScan prototype. The prototype is written in Visual Basic 6 using MapObjects and MapObjects IMS. Dave demonstrated the application's ability to select a map feature and connect to a related website; enter an address and create a point on the map with the map centered around the point; select different layers for viewing at different map extents. The CityScan team will begin looking into ArcIMS as the map server for the CityScan project in the coming weeks as well as continuing to develop the prototype.

Following the demo a discussion of the strenghts and weaknesses of ArcIMS ensued. Jack Avis's experiences with ArcIMS (as demonstrated with the PimaXpress project) were discussed, as were HTML viewer vs. Java viewer issues.

Skill development with a tie to the CityScan project continues with City DBA Paige Hamner now at a week long ArcSDE training session. Consultation with Veridian, a GIS firm with local offices, will take place starting March 13. A CityScan system design and architecture review is anticipated as the starting point for this consultation.

Official Address Data Management Update

Jack Avis of Pima County Development Services Department (DSD) discussed some of the history of how the the responsibility for keeping address records came to reside in Pima County Development Services. He discussed continuing efforts to research and reconcile differences between adcounty (master address point file) and stnetall (the Pima County wide street network file).

Of the previously identified 14,000 "problem" addresses (out of a total of over 310,000 address points), DSD has identified the problem with approximately 11,000 of them. In addition to determining the problem with the other 3000 addresses and fixing the problems once they're identified, Jack said there were an additional 1200 address in the Mt. Lemmon area they were looking into.

GIS Training - Basic GIS Concepts Course

Steve Whitney, Vickey Bagley and Anna Sanchez have put together a basic GIS concepts class for people interested in GIS but with little or no experience. The first edition of the class will be held April 5th in the Main Library Lower Level conference room, from 8:30 to 11:30. Steve hopes that everyone in the GIS Coop will make an effort to attend in order to provide feedback on the class. The class will use local data to inform interested parties of basic GIS concepts in a non-vendor specific environment.

GIS Cooperative FY 00/01 Budget

Don Ijams then led a discussion of the status of the current year budget for the GIS Coop. There is roughly $96,000 left in this year's budget to be spent by June 30, 2001. Some of the planned expenditures include money for new ArcView licenses and upgrades of existing ArcView 3.X licenses to ArcView 8 (expected out this Spring).

Also classes on Visual Basic 6.0 and one on VB and MapObjects are expected to be sponsored by the Cooperative. All classes will be limited to 12 seats. Attendance will be available to interested City employees, when the classes are announced.

Orthophoto Rectification Project

Steve Whitney discussed the state of this project, designed to rubber-sheet Pima County base layers to match orthophotos. Due to a new 2000 U.S. Census project related to Pima County redistricting, the rectification project is temporarily delayed. There are approximately 20 days of work left to complete the project. Steve anticipates (given no other new high priority projects) finishing mid to late April 2001.