Day 19 Another GIS day Today was another day primarily spent on tasks related to GIS. Several of us discussed the structure and vision of GIS for the city. This has been important not only because our city is working on a succession plan, but also because GIS is changing so much as it evolves…
Tag: GIS
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 15
Day 15 GIS Maps Yesterday at the very end of the day, our IT staff added a link on our Intranet site to the web map we had created. This is an online map of our GIS information that's accessed through a browser. Unfortunately we still haven't been able to make the web map in…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 12
Day 12 Another GIS Day Today ended up being another day primarily spent on GIS. I successfully was able to start a web service for some of our data. But when I went into the ArcGIS Silverlight Viewer Map Builder and put my URL into that data, it could not connect. I tried to look…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 11
Day 11 It's all about GIS Today was one of those days when I try over and over to work my way through a problem. Following up with how I ended on Friday, I went back to the ArcGIS Silverlight Viewer and tried to make a map. One of the first items I attemped to…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 10
Day 10 Today was a great day – well most days are pretty good, but a lot of really good things happened today! There were some minor tasks I took care of like arranging for our interns to help out the water/sewer department by shooting some elevations for a sump pump line they were repairing…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 7
Day 7 Night Meeting for the Downtown Master Plan I'm late getting this post up because I attended a meeting of our Downtown Master Plan Committee. We are in the process of having a plan prepared for our downtown area which is a big deal for us because we have such an awesome downtown and…
Enhancing GIS with Augmented Reality
The other day at work we visited with our police records office to learn more about their reporting software. One of the issues that came up in our discussion was inputting the “address” of incidents. The software they use relies on either point addresses or address ranges along a centerline – both common methods of…
Standardizing our GIS Data
Years ago when I first started building a GIS for my last employer, the city of LaSalle, it was difficult to locate guidance for standardization of data structures. Fortunately since then several groups, countries, and organizations have been working to develop and publish standards for the industry. ESRI has offered resources on their Website for…
Geospatial Resources & Outreach
The rise of mobile devices has allowed everyone to discover what those of us in public works have always known – geospatial technology is cool! Now everyone wants to know where people and things are and how to find them. Games and other applications are being developed based on location-based information. And to meet this…
Using Unity3D to Simulate a City
Most of my exploration of virtual worlds for engineering has been in Second Life and OpenSim. However, this year I have been looking more at Unity3D. Engineers are conservative and seem to dismiss virtual worlds like Second Life and OpenSim. Even though these programs are 3D modeling tools, they don't resemble nor do they use…