GIS Tips & Tricks
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Our range of expertise is not limited to local government: GIS training, avoiding angry Bulls, fishing in Wisconsin. Our Blog will keep you entertained and learning.
Looking for some new professional goals for the new year? If you’ve not yet made the move to ArcGIS Pro from ArcMap, may I suggest that you place that on the top of your list? We all know the time is coming where you’ll need to use ArcGIS Pro for most workflows - some of us were early adopters, some reluctant adopters, and some of us are still holding out.
Space planning and management is an important part of any college campus or school district. It helps facility managers ensure that they are optimizing the utilization of their space.
Often, facility spaces become underutilized as we move towards a remote hybrid environment. This can create an optimization problem as these unused areas still require costs such as heating and cooling, IT equipment, and general facility maintenance. Many space planning and maintenance personnel are wrestling with how to best address this issue and still provide optimized space usage across campus.
Coordination with surrounding PSAP territories allows dispatch redundancy and compounds the effectiveness of Next Generation 9-1-1 by establishing a seamless network through agreed upon boundaries, reviewed borderland addresses, and unified schemas. This work requires communication, agreement, and unified action.
Are you new to the ArcGIS Pro Parcel Fabric and want to map subdivisions? Find your bearings here with these 5 easy steps. First, review the subdivision plat and legal description. Before you jump into your Parcel Fabric and start editing your Land Records, you will want to read and review the subdivision plat. The plat is the legal record filed with the jurisdictional authority (County Recorder of Deeds, etc.) and is the basis for surveying and mapping a property.
ADA compliance is a big issue these days, with many agencies struggling to find resources to address their compliance issues. First and foremost, it is necessary to complete a site assessment of the existing conditions to determine areas that are out of compliance. Once an assessment has been completed, the agency can determine the best course of action to correct non-compliant areas.
What is stopping you from accurately locating all of your assets in the field and using that information to make informed, data driven decisions - Cost? Time? Outdated equipment or software?
Cloudpoint has been assisting clients with asset data collection for more than a decade, all while watching the technology continually improve and becoming more affordable at the same time. Gone are the days that a smaller organization would not be able to consider reaping the benefits of GIS. With these advancements we are able to bring GIS to any organization with an affordable, easy-to-use, mobile and collaborative environment.
When setting out to use GIS for Campus or Facility management, it is important to understand what type of data tracking challenges are currently present in your organization. This gets increasingly important to determine as organizations grow larger, start to create more data, and compile more historic records. These challenges typically revolve around the subject of modern-day data storage, but include the following:
The following videos will walk you through creating and saving trace configurations, publishing them in a web map, and consuming them in ArcGIS Experience Builder with the new beta Utility Network Trace widget. We will also look at how you can incorporate additional widgets, namely the Text and Table widgets, to display and export trace results.
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.
