Securing GIS Program Budget
by Ross Smith, Andrew Sheahen and Alistair Davidson, consultants, PA Consulting
All complex technology programs face the need for a substantial year-on-year capital and operational budget to successfully deliver their expected
benefits. GIS programs are no different. GIS managers, however, are not financial experts - they are domain and technology experts. As a result, it is common for GIS program managers to struggle to acquire suitable and sustained budgets for new and ongoing initiatives, especially when the GIS program is in competition with other corporate initiatives for a limited pool of funds.
This article will provide the financial layman, responsible for building a budget, a simple yet robust
approach to building a GIS program budget. We will provide a step-by-step approach to building your budget and offer guidelines and insights into what makes a strong and defensible budget forecast. We will explore how to build a defensible multi-year budget forecast from the bottom up.
The approach is broken down into five high-level steps. ... Read more  |
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The Evolution of Geocoding: Moving Away from Conflation Confliction to Best Match
by George Rebhan, Vice President, Product Management, Proxix Solutions
Over the past decade, the quality of street-level datasets has improved tremendously.
Advancements include more complete street geometry - exact location and shape, and more complete and correct street-segment attribution - street names and aliases, house number ranges, etc. Now, real estate parcel data have arrived on the scene with a huge impact on applications that require the most accurate location possible. PXPoint from Proxix offers users some options they didn't have before, and the end result may be a "best match," based on industry and application. This article provides
background about how geocoding has evolved, and why PXPoint is a good solution at this point in that evolution.
Geocoding Evolution
Street-level geocoding in the United States became available in the early '90's with the release of the Census Bureau's TIGER street network data files (and even earlier, with the Census Bureau's DIME files, though these were difficult to use). At that time, the founders of Proxix Solutions (the company was then called QMSoft) introduced key
industry firsts including national geocoding from a single CD and a single dataset. Before that, users often had to geocode address sets one county at a time! Another Proxix first was the concept of conflating (combining) the street-level spatial data with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) dataset - allowing Proxix to create the very first Coding Accuracy and Support System (CASS)-certified geocoder. (More information about the CASS system is available from the USPS.) Why was this conflation necessary at the time?
When the first TIGER files for Washington D.C. were produced (truly an impressive milestone), inspection showed that significant work remained. For example, attribution across segments of a street (one block to the next) might differ widely. Inconsistencies appeared in street names -
suffixes (Ave., Dr., etc.) were dropped, directionals (S, NW, etc.) were incorrect or missing, and house number ranges might be missing for segments at the end of a road and sometimes even from the middle of a road! ... Read more |
Brainstorming in Conceptualizations of Telecommunication Infrastructure in GIS: An Attempt to Integrate ISP and OSP through a Common Geometry Type
by Dejan Gregor, Consultant, GISDATA
I am a GIS consultant working for two years in the telecommunication industry
with enterprise telecommunication GIS solutions, but by profession I am a teacher of geography and a student in GI Science and GIS. As a geographer, I have been confused by the fact that the way we represent spatial phenomena is at odds with the way those phenomena really exist. These phenomena are not easy to represent and even harder to understand.
Some examples of this are soil types and petrographic geology units. These types of physical geography features do not start and stop at
the borders of a polygon; the polygons are just representative of "real world" spatial phenomena.
With respect to telecommunications infrastructure, I deal with the issue of abstract infrastructure that is symbolized as a physical feature in a GIS. For example, spans have been implemented as a linear feature class, although they cannot be seen in nature. Those abstract infrastructure feature classes are not physical obstacles inside an enterprise solution. However, creating
associations between spans as a parent feature class and cables as a child dependant feature class may cause a bottleneck for the system. ... Read more | |
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