GIS Tips & Tricks
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pace is expensive. Due to this simple truth, it is important to ensure the accurate digitizing of features and space inside your facilities. As more features get digitized within a designated facility, the inaccuracies will compound when it comes time to calculate the total ‘Gross Area’ and ‘Net Area’ of the building. These two area measurements are used when trying to optimize time, work and money spent on the building. At the very least, space costs about $10 for every square foot.
Trimble is a global leader in positioning technology and Esri is a best-in-class geospatial software provider. When these two powerhouses converge, great things happen. So you may be asking, ‘How do I get the best of both worlds from these vendors? Now with Trimble Catalyst, getting high accuracy GNSS positioning integrated with the mobile ArcGIS platform has never been easier…
April is Emergency Communications Month. Cloudpoint recognizes the often unacknowledged critical public service our nation's emergency dispatch and response personnel perform each day. Cloudpoint’s NG9-1-1 team proudly assists public safety stakeholders in implementing Next Generation 9-1-1 by preparing GIS data for NG9-1-1 from the current 9-1-1 technology. This implementation process, while systematic, is highly dependent upon the present status of an area’s GIS, ALI, and MSAG data. Therefore, each PSAP…
Enterprise geodatabase versioning is an integral part of Enterprise GIS workflows and allows for flexible and manageable workflows for multiuser editing scenarios. Branch versioning is a new type of geodatabase versioning available to Esri users. This new type of versioning has been reconfigured to alleviate some of the pain-points when using traditional versioning and relies on a services-based platform for version use and management. The branch versioning configuration also provides the backbone needed to extend available add-ons/usability of GIS data. Certain solutions like the Utility Network, Trace Network, Parcel Fabric, and Indoors within ArcGIS Enterprise all require data to be branch versioned. Another immensely powerful add-on for branch versioned data is the Validation and Batch Calculation Attribute Rules. Branch versioning may be a great solution when evaluating current and anticipated workflows and can open the door to a new age of capabilities for Enterprise GIS data.
Illinois passed the Lead Service Line Replacement and Notification Act in May of 2021, and it went into effect January 1, 2022. The ultimate goal is the replacement of all water service lines in the state of Illinois. Furthermore, this legislation does not only address replacing lines in public properties or right-of-ways, but replacing lines up to and even into private residences as needed. Sounds like a monumental task? You’re right, but then again, you’ve got Cloudpoint to call upon.
Have you become reliant on Attribute Rules in your desktop workflows? Are you frustrated that you can’t extend those to your ArcGIS Online users? Well, we feel your pain. Attribute Rules have greatly simplified some of our processes and we have been looking for ways to replicate those natively in ArcGIS Online. ArcGIS Notebooks provide a web-based tool for ArcGIS Online users to closely replicate workflows built around those Attribute Rules you know and love.
The easiest description of Indoor GIS is that it is used in the same way as regular GIS, just incorporating Indoor capabilities like floor levels and unit-floor-building relations. The Package of ArcGIS Indoors is actually a collection of three applications, including a mobile app and two web-apps, being the Indoor Viewer and the Indoor Space Planner.
The completed Next Generation 9-1-1 network will be national, state implemented, and operated by local entities. These multiple scales and the numerous agencies involved make the complexity of building such a network obvious…This blog endeavors to clarify some recurring areas of uncertainty, by examining both the local impacts of NG9-1-1 and the system rationale underlying NG9-1-1 requirements…
For proper data management, every item should be uniquely identified. Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) offer a truly unique identification method for each feature or table row. In the ArcGIS world, GUID values are commonly interacted with as Global IDs. The term “Global ID” is the official name for GUID values that are generated and managed by ArcGIS software. Is this Global ID value something we take for granted because it is so easily managed in ArcGIS? Maybe. If that is the case, this short read will lessen that chance and at minimum increase and/or refresh your understanding of how they work.
By now, most everyone in the tech world has heard about the Apache Log4j library vulnerability. While we are experts about all things GIS, we won’t pretend to have all the answers to this problem. However, in the essence of transparency and helping to spread the word, we want to share some general takeaways on what we know and some helpful links for more information.
In 2010, ESRI started the Community Maps Program with the goal of enhancing and updating their foundational basemap layers with current and detailed local data. Over a decade later, tens of thousands of updates have been made using the tools available from the program. By contributing data, the community itself benefits from having local knowledge input directly into ESRI maps. This additional data helps power advanced analysis and can be used to create in-depth story maps. Apart from the direct use of updating basemaps, this collection of local data also helps to enhance and power the ArcGIS Living Atlas layers.
When compared to traditional campus and facility management through CAD layers and multiple spreadsheets, ArcGIS Indoors offers a much more streamlined approach. Managing indoor assets through ArcGIS Indoors allows for improved facility maintenance, building operations, and indoor analysis across an entire campus thanks to ESRI’s ArcGIS Indoors Information Model (AIIM).
So much goes into transitioning a 911 system to NG911, from changing state policies to buying appropriate equipment to updating GIS data. This upgrade comes with a large price tag. There are a lot of variables and scenarios were calculated in the report to Congress, but we’re talking in the ballpark of $14 billion dollars nation-wide. Available funding varies widely by state, but…
The State of Illinois is committed to updating the State’s 9-1-1 systems to the standard of The National 9-1-1 Program, created by congress in 2004. NG9-1-1 systems allow emergency number services to quickly receive and load geolocated data via mobile and digital devices such as phones, medical devices, car computers, and building alarms. Cloudpoint has been involved in this work helping several counties and PSAPs to review and transition their 9-1-1 data into the NENA Standard for NG9-1-1 GIS Data Model. Cloudpoint also assists their clients in coordinating data alignment with surrounding emergency jurisdictions in an effort to establish a statewide network, thereby increasing resiliency to call overloading and disaster outages.
The Data Loading Tools are a free solution provided by Esri designed to help simplify and streamline the ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) process from a source dataset to a target dataset. The tools are packaged as a python add-in for ArcGIS Pro and help simplify migration by harnessing Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Within the spreadsheets migration mapping from the source schema to target schema can be set up for feature classes, fields, and even coded value domains. This toolbox is most used to assist with migrating data into the robust Utility Network schema, but it can be used for all ETL tasks!
When mobile data collection takes place, there are multiple ways of consuming that data once it’s been collected. Through the use of Dashboards, Web Apps & Maps, and even through desktop applications like ArcGIS Pro, data can be viewed, queried, edited, etc. However, there could be certain data collection workflows in which real-time notifications would be useful to notify other workers, or members of that organization. For example, if I were adding features in the field to a “City Code Violations” hosted feature layer through Field Maps, I could use a process in the feature’s pop-up to trigger an email to be sent to other users in my organization to notify them of the new violation feature I just created. Follow the steps listed below to implement this process in you organization!
By coupling ArcGIS Pro with some creative Arcade expressions, the editing and QA/QC experience can be greatly improved by adding attribute rules to a geodatabase layer. In this article we will focus on how to harness calculation-type attribute rules to perform validation checks on the existing data and…
One of the main benefits of utilizing Esri’s Survey123 application within your organization, is that it is a very powerful data collection tool. Survey123 can be utilized to collect data on just about anything and everything, and the purpose of the form will vary greatly depending upon what kind of data is to be collected. Regardless of what the end purpose of the survey form is, the best way to ensure data integrity and to streamline the data entry process is to have functionality built into your survey forms themselves to assist the end user! In this blog post, we’re going to be looking at how using an JavaScript query can automate the input of data by auto-populating fields in the survey form based on entering the ID of a specific fire hydrant.
