Fall NEARC 2018

AUTHORS: Katie Grillo, City of Cambridge, MA

ABSTRACT: The City of Cambridge has nearly 30,000 street trees that are maintained by the City's Department of Public Works (DPW). DPW was interested in reviewing their watering plans and also investigating tree mortality in relation to a tree's location. ArcGIS Pro tools and models were used with both LiDAR and 3D multipatch buildings to determine how much sunlight each street tree receives throughout the summer. As a way to make the results of this study more accessible to city staff, the solar rating is incorporated into the street tree data and displayed in a 3D web scene on ArcGIS Online.

AUTHORS: Michael Olkin, Alex Hiller, Kyle Barna – Springfield Water and Sewer Commission

ABSTRACT: Water utilities of today must marry century-old infrastructure with 21st century technology to meet workflow demands and customer expectations. Due to the varied and expansive nature of the water sector, such technology must be versatile in order to realize efficiencies. GIS applications play a pivotal role in construction, maintenance, planning, communication, and daily operations at the Springfield Water and Sewer Commission (SWSC). This presentation highlights how SWSC is using AppGeo’s open source General Purpose Viewer (GPV) web mapping technology to bring GIS data, CMMS content, and other SWSC systems together to improve operations and customer experience. The SWSC GIS staff’s approach to the process of testing, implementing, providing training, and supporting the use of a new web technology will also be covered. Demonstrations will include GPV capabilities that have been leveraged to automate or enhance SWSC workflows including upstream/downstream tracing of sewer pipes, user-friendly queries that help to automate asset reporting, enhancements in emergency management communication processes, and improvements to interdepartmental communication. SWSC provides drinking water to the residents of Springfield and Ludlow, Massachusetts, while wholesaling or providing peak water service to six other communities in the Pioneer Valley. SWSC is responsible for maintaining three reservoirs with a total capacity of more than 25 billion gallons, approximately 19,000 acres of property, and over 1,000 miles of water and sewer pipe.

AUTHORS: Michael Blair, Innovate! Inc.

ABSTRACT: Innovate developed a custom application, or Data Management Tool (DMT) to improve the quality, consistency, and transparency of US EPA Region 9 geospatial resources. As background, the US EPA Region 9 utilizes a wide range of Esri products in multiple internal, sensitive, and public environments. Maintaining an up to date and accurate inventory of data in enterprise geodatabases, ArcGIS Server services, and ArcGIS Online items is both arduous and complex. Further, a historical focus on project-centric operations tended to silo data by project area or support division, often resulting in data and metadata replication. While EPA Region 9 has deployed previous data management systems, their faults were often in the reliance of manual inventory updates and user input.

The DMT application provides a searchable, sortable, user-friendly interface that not only relates all of the content but checks for the existence of and completeness of related documentation, including hosting environment, metadata, unique identifiers, update cycles, and sharing settings. The application serves as a live, single point of entry for all analysts to find resources, and immediately identify their location, accuracy, and relevance.

The new DMT leverages the backends of enterprise geodatabases in Microsoft SQL Server, ArcGIS for Server, and the ArcGIS Online API to harvest and relate features in all three Esri products. The system is deployed in each environment and automatically harvests items in the enterprise geodatabases and those related to map service layers, including the metadata for all ArcGIS Online items to identify if any contain rest services.

AUTHORS: Emily H. Wilson, James Hurd, Chet Arnold – University of Connecticut

ABSTRACT: The University of Connecticut Center for Land Use Education and Research (CLEAR) has added a new date to the Connecticut’s Changing Landscape (CCL) land cover and land cover change study. The study now covers 30 years with 7 dates (1985, 1990, 1995, 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2015) of land cover. CLEAR has a long history of making the results of the study available on the web to all users in a variety of ways. Previous versions of the website used pdfs, static images and ArcIMS to name a few. Today, the information is being shared using the new geospatial technologies. ArcGIS server services are available to users, populate a story map and are consumed by a web app builder viewer with multiple, user-friendly tools. New, slick and interactive data visualizations tools, such as Tableau and Esri Insights, were assessed and are now part of the website. The presentation will show these tools, discuss how they are being used to share land cover and how their dynamic nature improves user experience. http://clear.uconn.edu/projects/landscape.

AUTHORS: Michael Blair, Innovate! Inc.

ABSTRACT: Innovate! Inc. developed a web-based Floor Plan application tool for US EPA Region 9 that provides access to information about Region 9 people, places, and resources. It displays the current list of all Region 9 employees, including contractors, grantees, volunteers (if any), and other EPA and federal agency staff stationed in R9. It also provides detailed floor plans for each space at EPA R9 Headquarters, other regional offices and place-based individuals. There are many layers that can be turned on that offer details of resources and emergency information for the building. The application was built using Esri JavaScript API and ArcServer and integrates AutoCAD floor plan data. Innovate was honored with a Federal Small Business Specialty (FSBS) Award during the Esri FedGIS Conference. Innovate! was named Esri’s 2018 Innovation Partner for our innovative usage of Esri technology in support of our client’s operations (https://www.innovateteam.com/innovate-inc-honored-at-esri-fedgis-conference-as-2018-innovation-partner/).

AUTHORS: Ian Sleeper, Stephen Patterson – Terracon

ABSTRACT: Python 3 and ArcGIS Pro are here to stay, and with deprecation of ArcMap and Python 2 looming on the horizon, it’s time to make the move. Fear not! Despite the title of our talk, the differences are subtle and only enhance the thrills that Python can bring to your GIS at any level. This presentation will showcase uses of Python 3 with ArcGIS Pro and Portal/ArcGIS Online; starting with simple scripts run within ArcGIS Pro’s Python Window, then with custom geoprocessing tools in a Python toolbox, and culminating with web tools built for ArcGIS Online and Portal using the new ArcGIS API for Python. Presented from the perspectives of both a trained developer (Stephen) and a GIS Analyst (Ian), we will touch on many facets of the Python-GIS ecosystem, such as Conda, ArcPy, custom libraries, and hosted geoprocessing services.

AUTHORS: Jason Wise, Terracon

ABSTRACT: We needed to deploy geoprocessing tools to multiple offices and automate a workflow involving ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Collector, and multiple in-house applications. At the same time, we were weaning ourselves off ArcMap, starting to use ArcGIS Portal, and responding to changes in Pro's Python management functionality. Learn how we deployed our own conda packages, used the Python API to manage portals, used Python to wrangle challenging Excel files, and streamlined tool installation and configuration for users and developers.

AUTHORS: Eric Herman, NYS Thruway Authority

ABSTRACT: Over the past several years, the Web Mercator projection has become the de facto standard for global web mapping services. Consequently, it’s also become a standard for many web GIS applications. Although this projection offers a number of benefits, users should be aware of the significant measurement distortions in that can arise when using this projection. Earlier iterations of Esri’s web application development tools required explicitly dealing with measurement corrections. However, the current out-of-the-box application development tools go a long way to helping ensure end users get more reliable measurements. This presentation will review the issue, and how the Thruway Authority’s use of the evolving Esri tools has helped deal with it.