GIS

Why show up at FOSS4GNA 2016?

rjhale · Mar 9, 2016 ·

I was debating this post most of the weekend – so I decided to set the egg timer at 20 minutes and run with it. Why show up at FOSS4GNA 2016? I’m saying “SHOW UP” and I know that’s not a good enough reason. Here are some statistics from the 2015 conference.

So you don’t want to show up because you’ve never been to one?

Almost 60% of the people there haven’t been to a FOSS4GNA event. 2015 was my second event.

I know what you’re thinking. I bet this thing is going to be full of those people – developers. I’m not going to understand half of what they are saying as they gulp down coffee and point excitedly at a half put together presentation they started 15 minutes before the presentation.

OK – so there are a lot of those people there – developers. Except – these good people are developing for you also. You can actually walk up to them and go “What were you thinking” and they will tell you. The one thing I was struck by in 2015 were the number of Government folk there – Open Source GIS just isn’t for Universities and Developers and people with weird itches to scratch. There were a lot of local government people from management down to technicians with GIS problems to fix and data to maintain. Probably the most interesting guy I met was a guy from LA County (county employee) who was going to use QGIS on a tablet for data display/collection. Another guy worked for San Francisco and he was throwing Geoserver on anything he could to decrease their reliance on ArcServer.

Are you alone at this thing? I consult and teach so I fell in the 13%. There are a ton of people there building commercial products. You’ve got the University people filling you about 16% of the group. I’m pretty sure a lot of Gov’t fell in the 17%. It’s a good mix of people. You are going to have a lot in common with most everyone there.

Finally as my egg timer is about to beep….

So I use FOSS4G in my consulting life. I’m using it almost 90% of the time these days if I have a geo problem to solve. If you skip to the last line – close to 10% of the the attendees don’t use it. They were there out of curiosity. I have several clients gleefully using it to maintain all their GIS data.

So show up. Come to Raleigh and look at the 10 workshops and close to 100 presentations on open source GIS.

oh and Thank you Eclipse Foundation for collecting this information….

Beep

Georgia URISA Luncheon – October 2015

rjhale · Oct 8, 2015 ·

Location: South Cobb Regional Library
George Woody Thompson Community Room
805 Clay Road
Mableton, GA 30126

“Cobb County Easement Update: GIS Conversion Process”

The purpose of this presentation is to provide the audience information about the Cobb County’s Information Services Department, GIS Team, procuring an enhanced county-wide GIS easement dataset, obtained from digital and paper records, of properties located within Cobb County. This dataset includes county-owned permanent easement features such as drainage easements, sanitary sewer, permanent sewer, drainage, conservation and preservation. The goal of this obtained, extensive county-wide dataset is to support the operational missions of multiple departments within Cobb County.

This presentation will explain how the GIS Team expanded on the data that they collected and created over the course of a 1-year period from internal staff to initiation with vendor contracts. During the 1-year period, the easement definitions were defined as well as the GIS database design. The GIS Team recently started their 2-year contract with a vendor to create GIS features for an estimated 215,000 easements that currently exist within paper and digital formats.

Finally, this presentation will also include a review of the pilot project (good, bad & ugly), the compilation of an RFP (Request for Proposal) and the vendor selection process.

Presenter: Jennifer Lana – Cobb County
Jennifer is the current GIS Manager for Cobb County. Jennifer has 18 years of professional GIS experience from the technician level to the management level. In her current position, Jennifer oversees Cobb County’s geospatial strategy in collaboration with a great group of GIS professionals.
Jennifer constantly stays on the cutting edge of the GIS software world. Jennifer also has hands-on technical expertise in various GIS areas such as Systems Architecture, Application Building, Data Management, Quality Control, and Data Analysis.

What’s in a name……

rjhale · Jun 29, 2015 ·

I’m having an identity crisis.

I was a Geology Major in College. For a while I was registered with the State of TN as a Geologist.

When I first started working for the Gov’t, I was a SE Technician. What was SE? I can’t remember. You progressed up the ladder from 1 to 4 and then tried to make the jump to something else.

When I made the jump I became a SD Scientist if I remember correctly. What was SD? I can’t remember. You progressed up the ladder to a 3 or a 4 and hopefully didn’t die from high blood pressure or a stroke when you entered management.

When I left and started NRGS everyone wanted me to have a title. You should be President Randal Hale. That was all too pretentious. Correct mind you, but I don’t like being called President. I’ve had people approach me and go “Why don’t you hire me and make me CEO or CTO or something?” I would always go “What’s in a name? Are you going to answer crazy emails? Or not digitize data if it needs it? How dirty are you willing to get as CTO/CEO?”.

For a while I would just go “Randal Hale, GISP” What’s a GISP? I’m a Geographic Information Systems Professional. Except when you think about it GIS is just a tool and that’s like saying you’re a Hammer Professional or a Stapler Professional. I’ve soured a bit on the GISP and I’m not sure what I need to do to reconcile that in my head.

Then I went through the “I’m a GIS Analyst” Phase which still didn’t answer what I did. I analyze GIS.

As of late due to a lot of changes in the way I’ve ben approaching clients I’ve started going when people ask “What are you?” I answer Geospatial Data Scientist/Analyst. I’m working with data that has a geospatial component and I’m providing the client with reports/data/maps to help them make a decision. My skill set has been growing as I introduce more QGIS/PostGIS/things to my clients. I haven’t had one yet yell “It has to be in ArcGIS”. Most don’t care if the data is sound. Of course Yesterday I spent more than half the day in ArcGIS. Which was sort of nice ultimately. Hadn’t done that in a long time.

Of course I could just go “I own a small business that makes noise with geospatial data”.

So what’s in a name? Do I have the skills to actually add “data” to a description of me. Have I walked far enough into the database pool? Dive more into R? Do I start quoting statistics at every corner? Do more GIS people need to treat their data as a database vs a pile of files or connections to a server……..

I don’t know. I guess another hazard of Small Business. I know what I do. So what do I call myself. For the record at the last few conferences my job title was Janitor.

Does it really matter – currently not a great deal – it just something else rolling around in my head.

Anyway – all this made me think:

Learn about gvSIG 2.1

rjhale · May 30, 2015 ·

So in today’s “Learn something new” and “don’t limit yourself to one tool” – gvSIG. I’m horrible about finding something thought and wearing it out. I did that with ArcGIS/ArcINFO for the first 23 (Holy Crap) years and now I’m doing it with QGIS. I do love me some QGIS though.

So – one more tool it doesn’t hurt to have around is gvSIG. GvSIG has been around for a while – from Wikipedia “The first part of the abbreviation stands for Generalitat Valenciana, the Spanish regional authority that the system was originally developed for. The latter part, SIG, is the Spanish equivalent for the English GIS.”

If you go back a few posts I did a post on OpenJump. GvSIG isn’t terribly different in some regards. Multiple Views. It’s built on Java. It has Sextante built in as it’s geoprocessing module.

It did take a bit more work to add some data than I’m used to – but it’s not hard by any stretch. You create a new view. You set the projection of that view. You add data to the view (right click in the upper left rectangle of a view) and in my case I also had to set the projection of the data. GvSIG didn’t recognize the projection and I had to define it. Once defined everything was good. Right clicks make the world go round – so to change the properties of any data layer you add just right click.

Probably the thing that surprised me the most in my American-Barely-Spanish-Literate self is this program (while having been translated into several languages) has most everything in Spanish. My english version still has a few dialog boxes that are in spanish. If you do any amount of searching you see the community is quite extensive and they have an outreach site and educational material. You’ll even notice with some more digging that their last Conference was numbered 10 and was held last year in Spain. You’ll also notice a large Latin American/South American/Spanish representation through out the site.

Is gvSIG any less significant than anything else? No. Not if you are worried about your data. You can do all your normal GIS tasks and then some with this piece of software. You can even make a map which has a one up on OpenJump. I still like QGIS – but it doesn’t hurt to have another piece of GIS software at your disposal.

I have installed 2.1 – and from what I can gather 2.2 is just around the corner.

So go out and learn something new – download gvSIG and explore some new software. You might find you like it, want to join the community , and maybe donate some money or time into making the software better.

T&M NTE By NRGS

rjhale · Mar 28, 2015 ·

What? Teenage Mutant Ninja What?

As a small company you’re always trying to increase services but not over commit yourself. I’ve done that way too much. A lot of people call me for advice. Some people call and when I mention “Hey – why don’t you pay us…….” the conversation drops and I hear nothing. I get a ton of phone calls about Open Source GIS and Commercial GIS and I provide answers and the people move forward and hopefully do good things.

So – with all of that I’m starting the “Time and Materials Not to Exceed Contract”. There are a few who already have it. Essentially what NRGS is trying to do is give you support but not kill your budget. The support contract is for X amount of time at X amount of hours. If we go over we contact you to proceed or to stand down until next months hours begin. The beauty of this – If we don’t work you don’t pay us. Perhaps you need help in April and Not May. Pay for April. You pay nothing in May. At the end of the year we haven’t gone over the agreed amount. We may not have done anything for your organization (and we don’t want that to be the case either).

So if you’re pre-paying for support and are running out of hours…
You need help with your GIS and not sure what to do…..
You are listening to sales people tell you what you should buy and don’t know if they are telling you the truth…

That’s what we are here for – to help, to guide, to get you moving on a better path.

GIS

Contact