Thanks to all who attended the EGIS Committee meeting on Tuesday 09/22/09.
Click HERE to view the powerpoint presentation in .pdf format (http://dpwgis.co.la.ca.us/website/egis/ladpwGoogleMapsApps.pdf)!
(Road Closures Application)
I don’t know if people saw this…from Directions Magazine.
Click here for a report called “Preserving Geospatial Data”
This report is mainly aimed at repository and archive managers and digital preservation specialists who are increasingly dealing with geospatial data; however it will also be useful to geospatial data specialists, academics and researchers who are becoming involved with the preservation challenges of geospatial data.
-Nick Franchino
This blog can be visualized on Google Earth!! Download the eGIS Blog KML Network Link here and try it out.
Wordpress, the engine behind this site, as well as a pair of plugins that I have tested (WPGeo and GeoPress), are able to convert the normal RSS feed that allows subscription to this site to a GeoRSS, which attaches a location to each post.
I did some research online and found the GeoNames web service, which among other things converts an RSS feed to a KML feed. For the GeoNames site and more information, click here.
I created a network link that uses the following syntax: http://ws.geonames.org/rssToGeoRSS?type=kml&feedUrl=http://gis.lacounty.gov/eGIS/?feed=rss2
You can replace our RSS feed with any other feed that you like – and you will see it on Google Earth.
Why am I excited about this?
This blog provides a flexible, powerful tool for content management, and notification. It allows multiple people to imput and view information. It can be integrated into multiple platforms (Facebook, Twitter, GIS sites like ArcExplorere, etc), with a single point of entry.
People interested in the topic can subscribe, author, and edit content, and have those changes automatically pushed out via RSS and GeoRSS.
Here is how I plan to test this first: The creation of a dedicated site for the maintenance of facility and service information across the County. Each site in the County will have a dedicated blog page, categorized by the type (or types) of facility. The person responsible for maintaining this information will be given a login and password that allows them to edit that facility. They can upload and attach pictures, blueprints, emergency response plans, contact information (the information is basically limitless). At that point, the system can take over and distribute to anyone who is interested and has the rights to view that information (since posts can be private as well as public).
People can subscribe to just the schools, or the parks, or a combination of the two. If new information becomes available, a person can comment to note a change (and that comment stream can be subscribed to as well).
I look forward to seing where we go with this.
There are two videos, each compressing the past three years into one minute of time. The two videos were created by the eGIS Group (Yoko Myers) and myself to show a more dynamic view of the information that the Assessor provided for a board response. I believe they provide an additional, dramatic, and unique way to visualize how the current crisis has unfolded over the past three years.
I think these videos are something that can be used to really convey the true extent of what is happening in the County, and hope you find them interesting .
I have created a set of instructions on how the videos were created, so that folks who want to do something similar will avoid all of the pitfalls that we went through.
This document is critical for County web developers, programmers, as well as county contractors, to understand and leverage the Web Services available at the Enterprise GIS. It will instruct, in plain English, how developers can use the services, how to point to them, and what benefits they can provide.
If you pass this to your web developers, they will be able to add GIS capabilities into web sites.
County of Los Angeles GIS Web Services (Feburary 16,2009).pdf
ESRI’s technology direction has become a lot more integrated with the “Web 2.0″ world. To me, ArcGIS Server 9.3is giving the County real tools to leverage its investments in GIS throughout our business environments. Key to that are the REST APIs and the way they can be leveraged by web technologies (Javascript, Flex, .NET, and Java – with Silverlight coming soon).
For people looking to see how to integrate in real life, I did some work a while ago pointing code available at ESRI’s resource center to internal County servers. ESRI has developed 4 different methods (Javascript, Flex, .NET, and Java – with Silverlight coming soon) to connect various resources. The attached files ONLY show the javascript methods, but this is probably the most popular at this time.
There are 2 groups of samples that are grouped into .zip files. These are NOT fancy. They just test the capabilities, and are pointing to an INTRANET server.
