Web GIS for powering communities
We migrated our website to WordPress in about August 2011.
Here’s a 2011 annual report for our blog, prepared by the WordPress.com stats helper monkeys.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,800 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 30 trips to carry that many people.
We’ve submitted a proposal to present at the next Newtech Conference, scheduled for next March in Bendigo. Here’s our abstract.
Mitchell Shire Council carried out their recent annual fire inspections on an iPhone.
Without any device configuration or speciality hardware, field staff identified and recorded at-risk properties in their phone’s web browser at a rate of up to one per minute, including driving time. Property addresses were validated at the point of capture, every inspection was recorded directly to the council’s GIS server, and office staff generated daily lists of properties in seconds.
Find out what’s special about Mitchell Shire’s GIS infrastructure, and how this data capture application was developed in a matter of days using open source tools.
Newtech Conferences are held in various locations around regional Victoria, and draw many people from local government and other organisations. We’ve participated in nearly every Newtech over the past ten years, especially in the last five years as a sponsor and presenter.
Groundtruth is proud to again co-host Melbourne Open GIS on Thursday 29 September.
Melbourne Open GIS is a forum to discuss open technology, standards and interoperability in GIS. Our meetings bring together professionals from geospatial and other disciplines in a casual environment for some presentations, informal discussions, socialising and some drinks supplied by our meeting sponsors.
Presentations will include:
Sign up at our Meetup page to RSVP or be notified of future events.
Our client needs to identify properties that have long grass or other fire hazards, so property owners can be sent a letter notifying them to cut their grass
before the fire season approaches. We needed a GPS with the ability to capture points, and maybe allow the operator to pick from a list of fire hazards. Easy right?
The Magellan MobileMapper 6 GPS seemed like a good fit, and it came with its own data capture software, called MobileMapper Field. The software sounded functional enough, and it was even capable of post-processing.
So here’s what we discovered:
I’m embarassed to admit how much time we wasted in trying to get a satisfactory setup of this software.
Fortunately I discovered that the client had a copy of ArcPad lying around from when they used a previous GPS. I promptly installed it on the MobileMapper GPS, and spent a relatively short amount of time (only one and half hours) trying to get that to work. It seems that the MobileMapper Field software had one last trick up its sleeve, and that was to not allow any other software connect to the device’s GPS. Resetting the device fixed that issue, and now, I’m ready to configure it for the fire inspection season, with only one week to spare before the first inspections.