GIS Co-op October 2006 Meeting Minutes

Attendees: Steve Whitney - PC DOT, Dave Koss - COT DOT Real Estate, Chris Mack - Town of Marana, Clint Chiavarini - COT UPD, Gage Andrews - COT IT, Linda Coon - PC DSD, Stuart Schillinger - COT IT, Andreas Molin - Town of Oro Valley, Jeff McConnell - PC DOT, Bryn Enright - COT Water, Mary Szczepanski - COT UPD, Angie Quiroz - COT IT, Terri Bunting - COT Water, Scott Shenberger - COT Water, Manny Rosas - PAG, Jenn Burdick - COT Planning, Johanna Kraus - COT DSD, Anne Day - COT Planning, Grant McCormick - UofA CFP, Barron Orr - UofA, Daniel Tuttle - UofA.

(My apologies if your name is not included or is misspelled - if you didn’t sign the “sign-in” sheet or if I couldn’t read your handwriting it won’t appear correctly above.)

1. Introductions.

2. UofA Remote Sensing Center presentation - UofA staff

Barron Orr and Daniel Tuttle presented their work on local community fire prevention strategies using GIS. The slides from this presentation will be posted to the Co-op website. A couple of web-based decision support tools were mentioned, including:

WALTER (Wildfire Alternatives) - http://walter.arizona.edu

RangeView - http://rangeview.arizona.edu

3. GIS-derived mailing labels - Clint Chiavarini

Clint presented an application for ArcGIS that performs advanced mailing label generation, beyond what PCLIS does. The application does geoprocessing, creates maps, and produces mailing labels.

The goal of this effort cooperatively develop this application to the point that multiple organizations can use it for mailing label generation. A survey will be sent to the Co- op membership to gauge interest in an application such as this, and to identify development partners.

4. Web portal case study - Steve Whitney

Steve gave an update on the web portal status: Case studies are currently being developed by PC DOT, TEP, and Tucson Water. These will be melded into a single presentation that will step through some of the past approaches to updating parcel boundary layers, how we perform updates currently, and the benefits to receiving new subdivision data in digital format.

A key to getting private firm buy-in for using the portal is demonstrating what benefits that the firms will realize from providing the data in digital format. TEP and Tucson Water are doing some internal checking to see if there may be any benefits that they could provide to firms that submit digital data. One incentive that we could offer is a free commercial yearly subscription to the parcel boundaries and street network GIS layers, a $6,500 value.

At the last subcommittee meeting it was discussed that many small efforts are underway within local government organizations to develop electronic plan review capabilities, and we will be exploring these further to determine how they may fit in with the portal effort.

5. Geodatabase subcommittee report - Steve Whitney

Steve gave an update on the Geodatabase modeling effort: The group is focusing on developing a common Geodatabase model for the street network. At the last subcommittee meeting it was agreed that the core attributes (those stored directly with the geometry) would include a unique ID, street name components, and address ranges. All other attributes would be implemented using a Linear Referencing System (LRS). Examples of "other" attributes include speed limits, number of lanes, bike lanes, bus routes, and such. One of the major goals of this effort is to enable other governmental jurisdictions to edit areas of the street network that lie within their political boundaries. We are hoping to accomplish this using ArcGIS Server.

6. Open floor.

Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS networks were discussed. The UofA is interested in anyone else working on or interested in a RTK GPS network using cellular and virtual reference stations for southern Arizona. An example of a commercial venture within Arizona can be found at http://66.213.233.35:9001/index.htm. If you are interested in working on a local effort, please contact Robert MacArthur at the UofA, robmac@Ag.arizona.edu.