TUgis Conference 2019

GIS professionals are increasingly using drones as a cost-effective way to collect high-resolution data for clients and other stakeholders. Drone technology allows professionals to conveniently collect data in areas that are difficult to access on foot, in detail that cannot be captured by traditional methods of aerial imagery collection. In this session, we will outline a typical UAV data-collection workflow for creating 3D models using a DJI Phantom IV. We will showcase post-processing techniques used to create high-resolution photogrammetry, and discuss potential applications in asset management, damage assessment, and planning.

How many ways can you use high resolution elevation data? Have you explored all the possibilities, and all the potential applications? If not, this presentation will highlight some of the ways that high resolution Topographic and Topobathymetric lidar is being used to create seamless elevation datasets covering our nations shoreline, as well as areas impacted by natural disasters like Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. This presentation will also provide an overview of how these elevation datasets can be used to support emergency response operations, and also the process of developing nautical charts.

This presentation will explain how GIS was implemented for Johns Hopkins Facilities & Real Estate (JHFRE). An office that provides facilities, planning, design, construction, and real estate services for Johns Hopkins, the amount of spatial and spatially related data that flows through the office, as well as the many decisions made within the group, made for the ideal case for implementing GIS. Cumulating with an online GIS application for the office’s stakeholders, the GIS team has completed the beginning step in the larger vision - to use GIS as the data hub for all of the office’s enterprise systems. With essentially no GIS or spatially compiled data, the office prioritized data collection and compilation in an effort to establish an authoritative basemap. Once the basemap was established, the team worked with the office’s internal stakeholders to determine operational layers that could be created as part of the first phase of GIS. The team implemented the latest Esri Enterprise software to manage and publish the data. In addition to details of how the data was compiled and organized in an enterprise geodatabase, the presentation will provide technical tips and tricks used within Esri’s out-of-the-box solution and detail how WebApp Builder was used to create the application that has been served out to the stakeholders. Most importantly, the GIS team is currently working through the lessons learned during this first phase. Included in these, is how the team is working to increase the user base and usage of the online application through one-on-one sessions with JHFRE staff, additional GIS services, and adding additional data layers to the application.

Netherlands Space Office (NSO) initiated a project called Intelligent Decision Support Systems (IDSS) for Farmers under its global initiative called Geodata for Agriculture and Water (G4AW). Under this project a small team of Advanced Chemical Industries (ACI), in Dhaka is working to democratize spatial information to paddy farmers of Bangladesh. For the first-time farmers can now see the disease and pest vulnerabilities of their lands through smartphone. For the first time, producers, retailers and policy makers are sharing a common space where everyone is spatially connected.

In ACI, a group of analysts started this journey in 2016 with a hope to identify different stages of rice with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image called Sentinel-1, starting from its transplanting stage to harvest stage. While different pest and diseases spread with different temperature and weather condition, the idea is to develop a model to map this pattern and the places where they are probable to outbreak. With the right weather forecast, the model creates a vulnerability map for each crop stage. The crop lands of Bangladesh are fragmented, heterogeneous and sometime patternless, making the whole task even more challenging. The lands here are geographically diverse, demographically intense and economically apprehensive. Fortunately, the techniques of remote sensing kept evolving.

The ArcGIS Enterprise is currently under development to systematically manage these data and develop interactive services considering multiple end-points where users can collaborate. The database collected from the satellite image analysis will be further processed and monitored with the help of Web Feature-Services and REST API endpoints to use with smartphone app called 'Fosholi'. The dashboards created using Web AppBuilder software will help to develop a decision support toolbox for academicians, students, entrepreneurs and policy-makers.

Asset inventories and roadway mapping can be achieved by collecting high definition LiDAR and imagery at highway speeds. I will discuss the benefits of using Mobile LiDAR for various types of projects including Asset Inventory, Pavement Condition Assessments, Roadway Mapping, and DTM Modeling. I will talk about the different tools that are used together on the Mobile LiDAR vehicle and how they can be implemented for mapping features along highway corridors. The presentation includes a case study in which Mobile LiDAR data and imagery were used to map signs on over 6,000 miles of roadway throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Cataloging, understanding, and leveraging vertical and facility inventories can be a formidable challenge for many organizations. Knowing what to capture and at an appropriate level of detail is only half of the issue, as finding useful ways to use this information is of equal importance. This presentation will cover how asset registers are designed for 3D spaces, how data are captured and compiled into asset inventories, how workflows are utilized to determine appropriate asset levels, and how 3D data from BIMs can be leveraged for visualization and usage in systems such as CMMS (computerized maintenance management systems) and BI tools such as Power BI.