A couple of years ago I was doing my regular catch-up on economic news and trends, and I picked-up on a concept that Michael Porter presented as part of a plenary panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. I’ve tracked some of his writings over the years on topics like global competition and value chain concepts, and he hit on a theme at Davos that resonated with me, because it expressed what I’ve believed for many years – that creating “shared value” for society is good for business. Although Porter wasn’t speaking specifically about the geospatial industry, he hit on values that I think we embraced a long time ago – values that attracted many of us to the GIS arena in the first place, and now, to the FOSS4G arena. What values am I talking about? Read on!

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (FRB) is currently running a Working Cities Challenge as a campaign for systematic change in older industrial cities in Massachusetts. The potential benefits of the program, “to advance collaborative leadership in Massachusetts smaller cities and to support ambitious work to improve the lives of low-income people in those cities”, is of national interest. The FRB studied a number of cities across the country that are successfully coming out of the recession, and looked for distinguishing characteristics that led to successful economic development initiatives in these “resurgent cities”. What they found is that the primary driver of recovery for successful cities was mutually beneficial public/private partnerships. This is consistent with the IDC prediction that 70% of successful smart cities programs will be driven by joint ventures between the public and private sectors, with city leaders and private sector leaders working together.

When Larry Summers served on the National Economic Council in the first Obama Administration, he had a hand in writing a budget guidance memo to the heads of Federal agencies directing them to coordinate efforts across agencies to concentrate their planned expenditures on “place-based strategies,” to achieve synergistic impacts. Understanding this symbiosis between the critical complements to economic growth and revitalization of urban areas, including public safety, education, transportation, and resource clusters (e.g. land use, capital availability, technology infrastructure, workers, and educational attainment), can help focus local investments where they are most needed. By getting everyone “onto the same map” with regard to the visual representation of a city’s assets and needs, leaders are more likely to see the potential benefits of coordinated place-based strategies. Economic geography and cluster mapping apply analysis and visualization that can be used in order to better understand the business ecosystem, leading to better investment planning and the creation of shared value. Porter also addresses this “next big idea” concept of shared value in articles, as part of the U.S. cluster mapping initiative, and via founding the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City.

Cities need specific strategies for growth, and part of the strategic process is making sense of multiple sources of data, to analyze and predict what will work, and what might not – and visualizing it on a map. Once a cross-sector team of leaders in a city is established and they develop a strategy, they then need to make sure they have access to data and tools to perform analysis, and methods to engage local residents. Modern tools and methods like geo-analytics and maptivism can help yield insights for leaders to access and assess data, and for citizens to engage. If collaborative thinking and communication is facilitated among leaders, and the power of citizen participation is harnessed – “crowd sourcing” in Web 2.0-speak – progress will happen.

If citizens are given access to information in combination with the right mobile and online tools, they can more easily elect to participate and engage, even if it is from using shared, public tools made available at community anchor institutions (e.g., schools, libraries) and social centers. Enabling self-election is a good motivator for encouraging citizen participation and democratic engagement. This concept is also described in Howard Rheingold’s book, Net Smart, which covers “how we can use digital media to help become empowered participants rather than passive consumers”.

If the FRB “Working Cities Challenge” is considered as a campaign for change, then getting the disenfranchised involved will affect change. By encouraging linkage and trust through no-risk maptivism, shared value will be created by sharing goals, ideas, and aspirations for place-based strategies.

By answering the “where is” question, maps can show the unfortunate segregation between: opportunity and poverty; jobs and unemployment; health care and disease; safety and crime; food and hunger; fortune and misfortune. By clearly showing where opportunities, jobs, health care, safety, and food are needed – visually tied to locations on a map – we can connect these concepts to where people live, more fully recognize the disparities, and engage the right leaders to craft long-term solutions. This shared visualization on a map can lead to a coalescence of thought, a game plan for healthy economic growth, and the flourishing of intelligent cities of the future.

These world-changing concepts are a part of my thought process every day. Here’s hoping sharing my insights have got you thinking about how to apply maptivism and place-based strategies to create shared value into your corner of the world, too.

The post Shared Value, the Working Cities Challenge, and Maptivism appeared first on Applied Geographics.

Olmsted Online’s digitized materials currently cover a pilot area of Olmsted-designed locations in and around Seattle and Spokane, Washington, including the University of Washington. There are more than 300 plans and drawings available to search and view, offering unique details and previously unavailable information about each site. Of the 300 current drawings, over 100 are geo-referenced allowing users to overlay original plans on present-day maps. In addition, Olmsted Online presents searchable data derived from the archives of the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, National Park Service, for all Olmsted landscapes across North America. To read the full NAOP press release, click here.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is widely considered the father of American landscape architecture, and is famous for designing well-known urban parks, including Central Park in New York City and the grounds of the United States Capitol. His sons, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and John Charles Olmsted, and their associates led the firm from the late 19th Century until 1979, designing thousands of landscapes across North America and internationally.

AppGeo, a GIS consulting firm specializing in custom web-mapping applications, led the team that worked collaboratively with NAOP staff to design and build the Web site. Team responsibilities included careful handling and scanning of original documents that were more than a century old, geo-referencing plans and drawings to current landscapes, data integration for plan-related photos and descriptive data, graphic design, and web design and programming. AppGeo is also managing the hosting of the site.

“The field of GIS owes a particular debt to landscape architecture,” said John Roache, AppGeo senior project manager, who coordinated the AppGeo team. “Via this unique project, which combines current GIS tools to highlight important landscape architecture and planning documents, we are partially repaying that debt. AppGeo is proud to help NAOP realize its vision for making these unique and informative documents more widely available.”

In 2011, NAOP secured a $235,000 Transportation Enhancement Grant administered by the State of Washington Department of Transportation to develop Olmsted Online. An additional grant of $5,000 from the Friends of Seattle’s Olmsted Parks enabled NAOP to enrich the descriptive content of the site. Moving forward, NAOP’s goal is to raise additional funding in order to digitize, catalog, and geo-reference for viewing on Olmsted Online drawings, images and written documents for all of the Olmsted projects across the United States and beyond.

“The Olmsted legacy includes more than one million plans and documents related to more than 6,000 projects across the nation,” said Iris Gestram, NAOP executive director. “These archival materials are fragile and located in a variety of locations. Our goal with Olmsted Online is to give the public and researchers access to these materials in digital form in a single place. Our research tools can be used to find a local park, compare an Olmsted drawing to a modern base map, download images for educational use and gain new insights and appreciation for the many ways the Olmsted firm’s work helped shape our parks and park systems, cities, and entire metropolitan areas. We are indebted to our project partners, the Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, Mass., and Friends of Seattle’s Olmsted Parks, for their exceptional support of Olmsted Online.”

“NAOP is building partnerships with organizations and individuals to add new data to Olmsted Online, continued Gestram. “We are actively seeking additional support in order to extend the project to all Olmsted-designed sites. Organizations and individuals are encouraged to contact NAOP to participate as a project partner or sponsor.”

The post AppGeo Develops Innovative Website for Olmsted Parks appeared first on Applied Geographics.

With the turn of the New Year I read many of the pieces that both looked backward at the year past and forward to what is coming, and I naturally tried to decide what I would have said. So, after nearly three months of mulling things over in quiet times walking my dog, and also at louder times as our company actively plans for the coming year, I think I actually have an answer:

The most influential thing I heard last year was Paul Ramsey’s typically brilliant talk at the OpenGeo User Meeting that followed the inaugural FOSS4G North America conference in Washington, D.C. His talk posited that our industry may be both misnamed and held back by the term “GIS” (geographic information systems). He argued that “GIS” connotes a particular type of software and doesn’t fully describe what many of us are actually doing, and he proposed an alternative name, Spatial IT (information technology). This new nomenclature strongly resonated with me. Brian Timoney’s blog piece from October 2012 provided an important and articulate “second” to many of these notions. Probably more importantly to me, my colleagues at AppGeo (founded in 1991) seemed to share the “ah-ha” moment of this relatively simple observation.

To me, the core of the argument for a “Spatial IT outlook” is that “GIS has grown up.” The professional-grade software (e.g., from Esri, founded in 1969) is incredibly powerful, mature and feature-rich. Most of the big data automation and digitizing projects have been completed or are underway. The “case for GIS” has been made to most geographically oriented organizations – be they government agencies, utilities, or the established cartographic houses like National Geographic – and “GIS” is in daily action managing and publishing geographic data. Most importantly, the public awareness and expectation for electronic mapping is extremely high whether on the Web or on a smartphone; whether in your house, office, car or city park. The battle for “geo-relevancy” is over.

So while lots of “GIS” is going on, the most interesting and challenging problems are no longer “about GIS.” Rather, the problems many of us find ourselves working on involve integrating geospatial information into complex workflows; or coordinating the efforts of stakeholders, data providers, and data consumers operating at different levels of government; or, publishing an ever wider array of geospatial information to new audiences who use the latest devices and user interfaces; or, extracting business and/or environmental intelligence by exposing and mining the spatial relationships, both hidden and embedded, within corporate databases, web statistics and sensor networks. Indeed, we are tackling many of the same challenges that the rest of the information technology and software development industries currently face. We just have a particular vantage on the “spatial” dimension, and the term “Spatial IT” captures these concepts perfectly.

The second-most influential observation that helped inform my personal view heading deeper into the New Year is that our geospatial marketplace continues to be disrupted in several dimensions. The first is the shift away from installed software to new Software as a Service (SaaS) and other cloud-based models. Once again, this form of disruption parallels change in the overall IT industry. No one has it all figured out and both our customers and suppliers seem unclear on how all this will play out, but all agree there are new opportunities and challenges. The second disruptive dimension is that the market has delivered a variety of new software offerings that pose new challenges to an industry that has had a sole dominant player for a long time. Whether exploring the increasingly stable and supported geospatial Open Source options (both desktop and server), or leveraging Google’s (founded in 1998) immense cloud as they open up enterprise offerings, people are exercising options beyond simply buying the latest and greatest from #1.

When I look ahead, I cannot help but conclude that it is a fantastic time for our Spatial IT industry. Never have there been so many choices, and the learning and experimentation is invigorating. It is always good to get out of a rut and see things from a fresh perspective. Indeed, spatial technologies are powerful and ready to be applied in new ways to different problems.

A company like AppGeo can be a business partner with the industry leader while also applying Open Source technologies in innovative ways. We can architect and construct the hybrid systems that Esri foresees to literally give our customers the “best of both worlds.”  We can both deliver and consume Web services while leveraging the largest, fastest and most stable commercial clouds to keep costs down. AppGeo’s world in 2013 is anything but the “same old, same old.”

And most importantly, in this new, disrupted world, I believe there is a secure place for a company like ours to do what we have done for more than 21 years: apply geospatial and information technologies to solve the wide (and always getting wider) variety of fascinating problems our customers and partners face.

The post Looking Forward/Backward in Early 2013 to Fully Embrace Spatial IT appeared first on Applied Geographics.

In Gloucester, Massachusetts, this historic city also has historic infrastructure to manage, which makes it all the more critical for staff to have access to plans and documents at any location where work may occur. 

To enable Gloucester’s Department of Public Works (DPW) workers to access drawings and plans for specific locations when outside the office, AppGeo developed a web application that is customized and optimized for mobile devices, primarily tablets. 

 “The tablet application has significantly reduced the amount trips and phone calls I have to make to get the utility information I need.  Anything that makes my job easier I’m gonna like, and this tool makes my job easier,” said Bill Gilliss, Gloucester DPW, Superintendent of Utilities.  

Gloucester Mobile Utility Application Screenshot Showing Selected Features (cyan pipes) with their linked plans (buttons on right)

Digital Plan for Fort Point, Gloucester, MA accessed through the Mobile Utility Application

Simplicity in design was a primary objective.  With just four touches of the tablet screen, DPW workers can locate themselves on the available base maps, turn on the utility system of interest, identify critical system feature attributes, and open digital drawings and as-built plans.  Workers can also place maintenance notes on the map while in the field.

Behind the scenes and as prelude to application development, for the past several years Gloucester has been proactive in electronically capturing water, sewer and drainage utility data from contractors and  from archived as-built  drawings in order to create the most complete and authoritative utility picture possible.  These investments are complemented by the development of parcel and address data by the GIS Department.  

When it comes to infrastructure, the public expects uninterrupted service and quick fixes to problems.  Gloucester DPW staff now can access location-specific critical information while in the field, and enhance their ability to provide the high-quality service their community expects.

By David Breeding, Assistant Project Manager,  and Tom Harrington, Director of Marketing

The post A Mobile Application for When Your Data Needs A Breath of Fresh Air appeared first on Applied Geographics.

As quoted in the WGWC press release on the award: “We are excited about this step in the development of CHAT,” said John Harja, Senior Policy Analyst in Utah’s Public Lands Policy Coordination Office and Chair of the WGWC. “The regional viewer application will allow the public and decision makers to better include state priorities for fish and wildlife in the earliest stages of the planning process, particularly for energy and transportation.”

“We at AppGeo are equally excited to have been selected by the WGWC for this important project for western states,” said Michael Terner, Executive Vice President of Applied Geographics and Principal in Charge for the project.  “It is a perfect match to our mission of helping organizations make their spatial data accessible and useful to the broadest possible audiences through online applications.”

The project scope is to present data in a consistent manner across 16 western states, enabling the viewing of resources, habitats, and wildlife corridors that cross state lines. The regional viewer will complement state-level CHAT websites that have already been launched successfully by several western states and groups of states.   

Image Source:  WGA Crucial Habitat Assessment Tools webpage

The post AppGeo to Build Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool for the Western Governors’ Wildlife Council appeared first on Applied Geographics.

Our expanded portfolio of work this past year, the growth of our staff, and our investments in new technology reflect many of the internal and external factors shaping our industry.  Some highlights of AppGeo’s 2012 include:

• Cloud Hosting – Our 2011 migration to cloud hosting for customer websites proved successful in 2012, enabling us to deliver exceptional performance to our clients.  An added benefit is that we’ve applied this valuable experience to help our clients choose among hosting options.

• Mobile applications – The popularity of smart phones and tablets is driving demand for new and innovative mobile applications for viewing and collecting data, and we have continued to build applications for these purposes, including launching a mobile version of the GPV.  Supporting a mobile workforce requires more than user applications, however.  Behind the scenes, we’ve gained valuable experience designing  the infrastructure needed to support a department of transportation’s mobile workforce.

• MapGeo Milestones –  Launched in 2011, our low-cost, subscription based MapGeo website for county and municipal government is now in use in seven states with more than 45 active sites.

• Recognition - We’re proud that several of our clients were recognized this past year with awards that included business process innovation, map publication, and significant achievement for a Web application.

• Platform Technology Options Expand – Since 1991 we have been committed to solving client problems with the most advantageous choice of technologies, and we continue to develop on the latest GIS software platform technologies – Esri, Open Source, and Google – separately and in combination.

• Geospatial Data Everywhere – There is more government geospatial data than ever and we’ve  been active since 2006 in helping states to make the business case for further data investments and expanded public access. Current examples include statewide  broadband availability data compilation projects we are working on in several states, and strategic and business plans that we’ve completed in the last year for statewide road, elevation, and orthophotography data.

• GIS Community – In April, we launched this Blog page on our website in order to combine company news with posts on our thinking and experiences in the industry.  We also presented, exhibited, sponsored, and attended more than 50 industry trade shows and conferences in 20 states.  

• Staying True to Our Roots – AppGeo was founded to provide comprehensive GIS consulting and we remain true to our roots, dedicated to providing objective and state-of-the-art  advice and solutions tailored to your needs, and to creating shared value for the larger geospatial community in which we participate.

 Fireworks over Boston, Photo credit:   Richard Taffe

The post Highlights of 2012 appeared first on Applied Geographics.

“Since July, we have added more than a dozen MapGeo subscribers” said Michael Terner, Executive Vice President, “and today there are more than 40 MapGeo subscribers representing counties and municipalities in 7 states, including Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia.”

The web usage statistics show that MapGeo sites are visited regularly and repeatedly, generating maps and views of all types of data.  Even more important than the numbers, users find substantial benefit in the data access provided by MapGeo.

“The feedback we are getting from subscribers and users is very positive,” said Terner.  “Local government staff, real estate and other business professionals, and residents have written to tell us how much they like the user interface and how MapGeo makes it easy to access local geographic data directly, saving them time and money.”

“Our focus at AppGeo is empowering our clients to put geographic data to work for real benefit,” said Rich Grady, President. “The democratization of authoritative local geographic data through MapGeo supports that goal.”

MapGeo is AppGeo’s next generation online property mapping solution designed for municipal and county government.  MapGeo leverages an attractive HTML5-based user interface and aggressive use of tile caching to deliver a very fast and friendly end user experience.  MapGeo embodies all of the advantages of the latest Esri and Open Source technologies for geographic data processing (tile caching), cartographic representations and styling, map service delivery, and web map interactivity.  MapGeo runs on modern browsers and tablet devices.

The MapGeo platform provides a predictable, low cost and dependable solution; there are no use-based fees, no plug-ins, and no software license requirements.  Everything (hosting, data refresh, and application updates) is delivered for a single annual subscription fee.  Improvements to MapGeo are bundled into frequent releases that are available immediately to all subscribers.

The post MapGeo Subscription Growth Expands Access to Local Geographic Data appeared first on Applied Geographics.

“This is another example of how interest in GIS and the recognition of the importance of location-based analysis is spreading to all corners of higher education,” said Grady.  “We’re enthusiastic about sharing our knowledge and experiences with this audience, and interested to hear about their perspectives.  Mathematicians and contributors from many other disciplines will help to shape the GIS of the future.  And the nexus of location-based services, big data, the internet and social media, mobile devices, and evolving GIS platform technologies challenges all of us to stay in ‘learning mode’ as GIS professionals.”

Photo credit: http://teachertechblog-lisa.blogspot.com/

The post Who will shape the GIS of the Future? appeared first on Applied Geographics.

MnDOT had the vision and the definition of more than 20 use cases by which mapping would add value to current Right of Way (ROW) work processes.  AppGeo is proud to have had the opportunity to work alongside  MnDOT staff on this project to geo-enable the Right-of-Way Electronic Land Management System (REALMS) in a manner that directly links mapping capabilities to the existing work environment and database system.  Our Team (including Minnesota-based Pro-West and Associates, and Rowekamp and Associates) worked with MnDOT to implement those use cases using AppGeo’s GPV technology, thereby making interactive mapping a seamless part of the existing REALMS work environment.  Going forward, AppGeo’s configurable GPV platform will allow MnDOT staff to continue to add mapping capabilities to REALMS in response to evolving staff requirements.

“This biennial awards program was developed by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to honor those who excel in improving the real property acquisition process while ensuring that property owner and tenant rights are protected.” (from the FHWA website)

Image credit:  http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/real_estate/practitioners/rowea/previous_winners/2012/pg01.cfm

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In this post, I describe five planning steps you can take to reduce costs and define a base mapping project that is appropriate to your needs and budget.

STEP ONE:  Evaluate Current Data

The first step is to review your existing base map data holdings to determine how much base map updating you need.  Here are three things to consider:

• Consider the type and pace of change in your municipality – If there has been little physical change in infrastructure in your municipality, perhaps a new orthophoto layer would suffice for some of the update cycles, rather than a full planimetric mapping effort
• Check to see whether data sets like utility features have been accurately surveyed on the ground so that they might not need to be photointerpreted as part of a base mapping project.
• Determine the accuracy you need for departmental functions and whether the accuracy of current features matches the use, for example, do you need greater horizontal accuracy to support utility management and planning than your base map data currently provides?  Are there flooding issues or development projects that require greater vertical accuracy?

Limiting the base mapping project to orthophotography updates or reducing the collection and mapping of features translates into lower costs.   On the other hand, if current mapping does not support critical government functions, an investment in higher resolution base mapping can and should be justified by those beneficial uses.

STEP TWO: Identify Outside Resources

The second step is to inventory other data resources so that you do not needlessly (recreate) data that already exists and may be “good enough” for your purposes, or duplicate the effort of other data collection programs:

• Research what is already available for your area. Many states and counties have base map programs with freely available data that could meet your needs. Usually these are of a smaller scale (lower accuracy) than what you may desire, with the pixel size being between 1foot and 1 meter.  Most often orthophotography is available. I expect more elevation data to become available from large area LiDAR programs. Detailed planimetrics are less likely to be availableexcept for major features such as roads. That said, each state has a website listing many available GIS data sets.
• Some states and regions have programs allowing municipalities or groups of municipalities to buyup for higher resolution imagery and other base map data products in conjunction with a planned statewide program.

STEP THREE: Team Up  

Seek out opportunities to team up with adjacent entities to reduce costs.   Planning amd mobilizing for the flight, ground control and production incurs a significant portion of a project. If these costs can be spread over a larger area, the unit cost will be lessened.  It can be tricky to coordinate with other jurisdictions and it can lengthen the lead time for base map acquisition, but it’s worth looking into.

STEP FOUR: Set a Budget

Now that you’ve defined your base mapping project and scope, it is time to develop a realistic budget: Talk to vendors and get a realistic cost estimate for what you want to do.  Get advice on vendors from other GIS programs and ask for “back of the envelope” quotes from several of them.  Ask for some options in scale or content to give you a sense of the range. Be sure you have money in place for the project. With an April flight, it is possible for the project to span 2 fiscal years- flight and ground control pre-July 1 and the production in the new fiscal year after July 1.

STEP FIVE: Plan for Acquisition

A detailed RFP ensures you get comparable, competitive pricing for the specification and size of project you have defined.  It should include detailed specifications on scale, map projection; flight conditions; imagery; ground control; accuracy; detailed planimetric database design; and specifics of the deliverables.

The four main tasks in base map procurement are:  (1) Planning; (2) RFP management and vendor selection; (3) Quality review and acceptance; and (4) Project management.   In an upcoming post, I’ll talk more about RFP management and vendor selection.

By David Weaver, GISP, Vice President, Head of Cartography, who has helped clients to plan and complete more that 60 large-scale base mapping projects.

Need Help?

In performing all of these steps you have a choice whether to tackle these tasks yourself or ask for outside help.  In my experience, a little outside assistance can save you time and money.  Contact me to discuss your project.

The post 5 Ways to Lower Cost and Increase Value for Geospatial Base Map UpDates appeared first on Applied Geographics.