So next week is the TN GIS meeting at Montgomery Bell State Park. Which will be the first conference I’ve walked into in 2 years and 2 months. I’m doing two things while I’m there – well three:
- Walk a lot
- Teach an OSM workshop
- Give a talk on the 911 project.
So – the 911 project. I actually haven’t said much about it in a while. Well…..it’s gotten interesting.
Back in 2000 I did a talk on PostGIS day about how this had worked and by that point the project was about 2 years old. At that point I had talked to a lot of people in TN on the project and the general feel was that this was a lone wolf project – in other words no one else would want to use it. Plus I was getting a little anxious on how to grow it. I was even advertising it as a “server” – which yes it’s all housed in postgresql/postgis with QGIS as a front end.
So I did something weird and tossed it up on github and started working on it. Cleaning up code. Issuing tickets to myself and generally working. Out of nowhere Kyle Snyder came in and cleaned up some code. Now there’s two of us “doing things”.
So what’s the point? Well the point is I hope more counties in TN actually use it. I’m going to discuss it next week and show a running example. Basically at this point we just about have the TN NG911 standard 95% “running” as published in the manual. Hopefully by next week we have some instructions. I’ve got a few menus set up for QGIS. You get a ton of flexibility “out of the box”. Plus all this cleanup is going to be good for Henry County as I’ll use it to update what they have after some more testing.
The next big thing is I’ve been experimenting with PyQGIS and the discussion between myself and Kyle has been “what can we offload to QGIS and what does postgis do better?”. Do we set up QGIS to do address ranges on roads? Maybe we set up some pre-address or auto-addressing. Possibly that’s a processing toolbox thing. What if we work it all out and leave it as a PostGIS script? We’ll figure it out.
Anyway – It’s pretty exciting. It is a bit messy currently. Kyle’s teaching me about Github Projects. I’m explaining my insane ideas. We’re pushing and pulling all that we can. It is nice to dump all this out into the open for everyone to pick at – maybe someone else in the 911 “address maintenance space” finds it useful.
Need some help? Yell.
