Public Sector

In order to effectively maintain, rehabilitate, or install pipelines and underground infrastructure, stakeholders must identify where assets are located and manage this data effectively. Three-dimensional (3-D) locations (XYZ) of pipelines can be achieved using various technologies. These technologies can coincide with additional condition assessment tools to provide accurate pipeline positional information along with geo-referenced pipeline condition assessment data such as CCTV video, leak detection data and interior and exterior corrosion data. Once gathered, this information can be managed effectively through GIS.

Tuesday, April 27^th
9:30 a.m.

Maricopa County has GPS units installed on sweeper trucks that broadcast data when brooms are lowered for sweeping. Information is transmitted at 30-second intervals providing speed and location of the sweepers. GIS is used to process this information and monitor the project. The automated process replaces manual inspection and provides verification of work completed against work invoiced, assurance that speed limits are within specifications; and support in litigation cases.

The reliability of our electric power grid is decreasing while our dependence on it is increasing. A smart grid is much more complicated than our current grid. Managing and operating the new smart grid is going to require a reliable digital model of the grid, based on accurate, up-to-date engineering information. The common causes of poor data quality will be discussed, and examples of working solutions for addressing these challenges will be presented.

Water rights management is a voluminous and complex task, particularly in those agriculture-rich areas of the United States that depend heavily on irrigation. Within the jurisdiction of the Central Platte Natural Resource District (CPNRD) in Nebraska, for example, over half of its 2 million acres are certified as irrigated agricultural land. This session will discuss the GIS-centric, transaction-based application employed by CPNRD for documenting and tracking active and historical water usage within the district.

This presentation will cover how to leverage GIS and ground-based 3-D laser scanning and aerial LiDAR technologies to efficiently analyze and view alternative green energy projects. Using Google Earth and ArcGIS environments, we use the 3-D data for siting projects based on physical constraints and to calculate the energy potential from wind and solar. Case studies will include sites as large as 4,300 acres and as small as a single rooftop. Each attendee will take away a basic understanding of how these technologies work together and how they can be applied to green energy projects to reduce greenhouse gases and build a better future.

SRP’s Land Records Division created a Web-GIS Land Records Information Management System (LRIMS) to dramatically improve the efficiency and ease with which users access the organization’s scanned land records documents. The LRIMS-Flex application includes a sophisticated security model that controls document access privileges across a wide number of user groups. This presentation provides a technical briefing on the creation of the LRIMS-Flex application with a short demonstration of the capabilities of the application.

One of the most exciting technologies to allow a company to connect the operator to the solution is the enterprise Web portal. When defining the enterprise Web portal, it is important to understand that it is more than a flashy Web site. Rather, the enterprise Web portal is a Web-based, business-critical system. This presentation will explore the best practices of planning, implementing, and deploying a successful enterprise Web portal.

Modeling the Real World
Ton Di Vries, Bentley Systems, Inc.

Infrastructure professionals rely heavily on cadastral data. Governments worldwide are planning thousands of new infrastructure projects to stimulate faltering economies and to repair, strengthen, and expand existing structures to avert catastrophes. Though projects will vary widely in scope and nature, planners and engineers will have one common need: information about the land. This session addresses the challenges infrastructure professionals face obtaining accurate land information, streamlining work flows, managing infrastructure information, and collaborating across distributed teams.

Tuesday, April 27^th
3:15 p.m.

Economic gardening (EG) is an innovative entrepreneurial approach to local economic development that was founded 20 years ago by Chris Gibbons, the Economic Development Director of Littleton, Colorado. EG has multiplied the jobs and sales tax base of Littleton and other communities worldwide, that have employed this approach. Learn what economic gardening is, how it works, and how GIS is used and has become an integral part of the program.

The city of Scottsdale is implementing GIS to maintain water and sewer infrastructure. ArcGIS custom tools were developed to automate work flows, synchronize office and field edits, and improve data integrity. A custom Workset Manager tool synchronizes work among multiple data editors. The presentation will demonstrate custom editing tools that automatically convert features to linked graphical inset features, the Workset Manager Tool work flow, and how custom coding extended existing ArcMap functions for work flow automation.

The strength of cloud computing is that it dramatically reduces the investment costs for users, required for processing high-volume geospatial data. But in order to have confidential or even classified geospatial data processed in the cloud, service level agreements must ensure the seamless protection of the data. This paper introduces a concept to declare and enforce service level agreements preventing unauthorized use.

The city of Portland has developed a number of GIS-based, high resolution risk assessment tools and processes for its Advanced Asset Management program in planning sewer work. The methodology involves a wide variety of spatial data correlated to finely resolved asset inventory and inspection records. Factors such as sewer condition grades, remaining useful life, high resolution cost estimation, and risk assessment, among others, provide for a much wider range of management options than previously available.

Software as a Service has been successfully applied to Web-based light applications. Although highly desirable, infrastructure GIS applications pose a few challenges for the SaaS model. In this presentation, we will show how to overcome these challenges and present a solution that has been applied to telecom infrastructure. We will also present the benefits of this mode of operation for the operators in the infrastructure arena in general.

Offshore wind energy is a key component of the U.S. Department of Energy’s 20% Wind Energy by 2030 plan, representing over 50 GW of the 300 GW estimated total required by 2030. The Gulf of Maine in particular shows significant promise for offshore wind power development. This presentation covers the groundbreaking use of geographic information systems (GIS) and large-scale geospatial data compilation to identify potential sites in the Gulf of Maine for offshore wind projects.

The implementation of a mobile resource management (MRM) system can provide cost savings and a host of other benefits to an organization. This presentation is geared to organizations considering the implementation of such a system and represents an effort to explain the various components, provide insight into the pros and cons of differing approaches to the technology, and cover some of the benefits a system can provide.

Remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) are a powerful combination. They form a very unique perspective of the behavior of ground subsidence resulting from the decline of groundwater in alluvial aquifers. When it comes to large infrastructure in central Arizona—such as flood retarding structures—knowing what is happening on our landscape is critical. This presentation will share information about the culmination of various geospatial sciences and technologies.

The first part of this presentation will review the relevant GIS functions that are used by health care planning researchers and identifies the advantages of using these functions. The second part will focus on presenting a GIS application created for the purpose of exploring the demand and supply of health services in Jeddah city, Saudi Arabia. The created application covers three major analytical issues identifying the level of health services supply, defining the location and characteristics of health demand, and determining the level of accessibility to health services in Jeddah city, which is achieved using accessibility indicators scores.

Software as a Service (SaaS) has gained widespread acceptance and adoption in the wider industry and increasingly in GIS with applications hosted in the cloud delivered on-demand over the Internet. SaaS removes the need for users to install and manage their own software, reducing deployment costs and timelines. There is a wide range of capabilities of GIS SaaS offerings. SaaS will allow more people in more organizations to use GIS for real business advantage.

The presenters will showcase three different successful implementations transcending several utilities verticals, platforms and applications. This is a GIT UR DUN implementation of modeling and migration for geodata warehouse based on CITRA open technology, utilizing Oracle Spatial. All base data, application data, as-built data, and third-party data is integrated and shared ubiquitously across the implemented organizations. Each environment has different applications, data, and requirements. The CITRA core technology accommodates all the varied environments, technology, and client specific requirements.

As utilities across the U.S. have started to make advances toward a more risk-based approach to asset renewal forecasting, two challenges have arisen: 1) the lack of reliable, local data on the expected lives of assets, and 2) the need to effectively coordinate with the plans of other city departments (e.g., streets) to maximize the cost-effectiveness of pipeline renewal efforts. This presentation will cover pilot studies at two major cities in the U.S. where these challenges are being addressed with sophisticated data analysis and decision support tools. These pilot efforts represent the next steps for cities interested in accurate and realistic long-term forecasting of asset renewal investments in order to cost-effectively manage risk.

The City of Tallahassee Underground Utilities has implemented bi-directional data integration between GIS and custom developed mobile work management applications. This effort provides for optimized dispatching of fieldwork from a GIS interface and enhanced data integrity through updating of GIS critical attributes captured during fieldwork. This implementation was handled entirely by internal city of Tallahassee employees from several departments and involved extensive custom development.