GIS Cooperative Meeting Notes

City Information Technology Dept. Pueblo Room

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Present: Steve Whitney, PC DOT; Don Ijams, TPD; Blanca Espino, COT DSD; Jack Avis, Marana; Manny Rosas, PAG; Mike Rose, The Planning Center; Laura Pinnas, TEP; Dee Korich, COT Env. Svcs.; Teri Schultz, TFD; Christine O'Connor, COT IT; Joe Gulotta, TFD; Joe Jakoby, General Svcs.; Robert MacArthur, UofA; Andrew Acuff, PC Dev. Svcs.; Jeff Lockwood, TERC; Mike Duncan, NW Fire; Melisa Hadinger, Tucson Water; Bryn Enright, Tucson Water; Robin West, TDOT; Grant McCormick, UofA; Francisco Leyva, TDOT.

GIS Cooperative Chairman Steve Whitney presiding.

Eyes in the Sky Program

Jeff Lockwood, TERC (a science and math education group), and Holly Colonna, Tucson Unified School District, gave an overview of the Eyes in the Sky project, which is ". . . funded by the National Science Foundation's Information Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program and offered through TERC, (and) engages middle and high school teachers in a comprehensive 18-month professional development experience. The program prepares teachers to facilitate student use of geospatial information technologies (GIT) for community-based research while increasing students' awareness of GIT/GIS/GPS careers and workplace skills."

A request for speakers at their June workshop was made, and I believe that all slots have been filled. Thanks to those that signed up to speak! For more information, contact Jeff (jeff_lockwood at terc.edu), or Holly (Holly.Colonna at tusd.k12.az.us).

What's new in the GIS Library

HSNED1PE: Is a new hillshade Grid derived from the 10 meter USGS National Elevation Data (NED). It only covers the Eastern portion of Pima County, since a 10 meter Grid for the entire county exceeds the software limit for Grid. A Western version is in the works.

PAREGION: A new attribute field for zoning will be added, Zone_ol (the _ol stands for overlay, i.e. this field was derived from a geospatial overlay process), which will contain zoning in the format of __. This field will identify split zoned parcels for QC purposes. For example, a parcel with split zoning could have a Zone_ol value of:

GR-1_PC_98.34,SH_PC_1.65

The above example indicates that the zoning boundary and the parcel boundary are not coincident and corrections may be in order. To identify split zoned parcels, one would perform a query on the field Zone_ol to select all parcels for which Zone_ol contains a comma.

STNETALL: The attribute field Street.name will be expanded to 30 characters (from 20) to accommodate long street names, which currently get truncated.

Emergency Response Subcommittee Report

Work continues on the 3 focus areas for the Tucson Fire Department support effort, hardware, data, and application. Currently TFD is demo'ing laptops for their vehicles, a preliminary data layer list has been developed and is being reviewed, and a field trip to the Phoenix Fire Department is scheduled for June 8th to review the in-house developed system that Tucson Fire might use in its vehicles.

Electronic Plans Submission Subcommittee Report

The Electronic Plans Submission (EP) Guidelines have been finalized and approved by the GIS Cooperative. They are available for review here on the Cooperative's web site. The subcommittee will focus on promoting the guidelines within the user community.

Geospatial Organization Initiative Report

Changes to the Arizona Professional Land Surveyors (APLS) bylaws will be voted on by the board of directors on June 5th. If the vote is favorable, there will then be a 60 day review period, after which the new bylaws will be voted on by the general membership. If the vote is successful, then the real work begins to define what constitutes a Geospatial Professional.

Pictometry follow-up/PAG Ortho2005 Project

The Pictometry pilot is moving forward, and it looks like we'll be able to cover 24 square miles. The LIDAR pilot project is wrapping up and the data is being evaluated. For the Ortho2005 project, it looks like the RFP will around October 2004, and the flight will take place in February/March 2005.

GIS Survey

A GIS survey has been developed by Larry Cassen, of City Environmental Services, to address various ideas for the Cooperative. The survey will be distributed to participants in the near future.

Standards for GIS Library Layer Names

As the number of GIS layers in the GIS Library continues to grow, layer naming can become difficult. One way to address this is to come up with a standard way of classifying layers within their layer names, i.e. a standard two letter abbreviation could be used for the first two characters of a layer name. This naming convention already exists for specific layers in the Library, and could be expanded upon.

For example, most of the street related layers begin with "st", i.e. STNETALL, STINTERS, etc. While it is granted that many layers already exist in the Library that don't really conform to a two letter abbreviation, this convention would only apply to new layers added to the Library. Over time, we can evaluate the conversion of pre-existing layers to a standard naming convention on a layer-by-layer basis. This will be further discussed at future meetings.

Future Meeting Presentations

Suggestions for future presentations at the Co-op meetings tended to focus on user presentations. Some examples given included crime mapping, regional floodplain data repository, traffic control, and the routable street network.

Open Floor

The City neighborhood layer (hoa_city) is being fine-tuned, to better match the street network and recent orthophotography. The new version is now on the GIS Library.

City High School is moving forward in their development of a GIS-enhanced curriculum. Assistance from local GIS folks will be integral to the success of this effort.

Next Meeting:

Tuesday, June 15, 2004 / 3:00 P.M / City I.T. Pueblo Room