The City of Regina (Canada) managers in the roadways and public works divisions said the use of GPS led to a 100 per cent repair record for the year. Yep, all the potholes got patched thanks to GPS in the trucks, says the article. Correlation or causation?
- CBC
New York City’s NYCityMap, DoITT and its GIS Director Colin Reilly get some love from Government Technology. Back end? Geoserver.
- Government Technology
“It’s not what you see in TomTom. It’s our data, which is much, much more accurate. They’re also able to create data themselves. So if they’re in the field and a hydrant doesn’t work, they can click on it and put a note that says this hydrant isn’t working.” That’s Centre County’s GIS (Geographical Information System) director, Nick Barger. I like that he said TomTom and not Google Maps. And, I like that he knows that the best data is local. The article is in fact about the Geospatial Revolution project; The Centre Daily Times is the local paper in State College, PA. State College is in Centre County.
- Centre Daily Times
Mike Kay, the Frederick County forester for the Department of Natural Resources is working in the Green Ridge State Forest in Maryland to inventory the trees. The goal: certifying the forest as sustainable to make its wood more salable. A key tool: GIS.
- Frederick News-Post
Arlington, TX updated its online mapping site, which is now more accessible for those who don’t know how to manipulate layers, per Tom Konzel who did the update. It’s ArcGIS + Silverlight. What’s interesting is that both the old ArcIMS site (accessible via this page) and the new one are online, so you can compare the two. I might use that in my lessons on user interfaces this winter.
The Silverlight site has a transparency slider that shifts between zoning, aerial and flood zone backgrounds. That will likely be new to many users. And, I wonder if folks will know that some of those details are only available when zoomed in? At the default scale, the pure aerial view is pure white.
I had a bit of trouble getting the find address tool to work since you can’t type in an address, you must pick it from the drop down (which seemed to be slow to appear). When the address is found it immediately zooms you in, so any context you had is gone. But local facilities to the address are listed - like libraries and the services the offer. Oddly the icons for those services including the twitter “T” for ESL tutoring and the RSS feed logo for wireless. The labels when you slide from zoning to floodmap are different - and often in different places. I guess it was not possible to use the same ones for both.
I could find no help tool, either.
- Star Telegram
If you are city that wants to take a fresh look at how it deals with regular old city problems, consider applying to participate in the Code for America 2012 City Program. Leaders from cities selected will work with coders to tackle one area of concern. Deadline: March 1 2011.
- details
- announcement blog post
After some pressure from the EPA the Illinois EPA is putting together a GIS to better manage confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.
“The long-term plan is to develop a GIS (geographic information system)-based program,” that will be available to EPA staff throughout the state, he said. For example, if a citizen complaint was called in, the EPA would be able to type in a farm, watershed or township name and see what facilities are there, complete with recent aerial photos of the site, according to [Bruce] Yurdin [Yurdin, Illinois EPA’s manager of field operations in the division of water-pollution control].
- News Gazette
