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| Presenter on Dominican Republic GIS (GeoRabble #6 Melbourne) |
GeoRabble #6
Cramped in a dungeon style room in a bar, GeoRabble #6 is a hub of discussion, networking and exchange of GIS knowledge. Whether you are user, developer or owner of geospatial business, GeoRabble is a place to rabble about our love - GIS ! We had multiple presentations (no Sales Pitch!) in two hours - crisis leadership, Bushfire management, open data in Victoria, evolving Melbourne, UAVs and Application of GIS in Dominican Republic. All speakers covered a great deal of material, the challenges and success of the GIS applications. For this blog post, we focus on two:
Dominican Republic
After listening to many presentations, 100% of the presentation were purely focusing on Melbourne and Victoria (nothing wrong but we need to expand our minds). I wanted to hear something international and we had one! The speaker is senior consultant and signed up for Australian Aid Volunteers program (a Australian federal program of sending professional and technical volunteers to developing program.
When she saw the opportunity, she met the language and technical requirements needed for the volunteer. She was posted to one year in Dominican Republic for GIS implementation in Emergency Management. Dominican Republic is subjected to multiple hurricanes, tropical storms and earthquakes (let's remind ourselves of Haitian earthquake in 2010).
Her assignment was to coordinate and establish a multi-agency geospatial team for disaster management (EIGEO). It was built under the recommendation from United Nations. The purpose of EIGEO is to gather, store and produce information for Emergency Commission (Dominican Republic)
First challenges she faced:
- Difficulty in obtaining GIS data or outdated GIS data
- No trained GIS staff
- Uncoordinated GIS activities and lack of sharing of data among government agencies
- Politicized environment which acts as an impediment for data sharing
- Work culture which is very different to Australia
Process of setting up EIGEO:
- Creation of National Information Systems for Disaster Management
- Built on Open GIS tools
- Identify and follow-up on dataset gathering
- Building a system
- Activation and response during Emergency
- Create a GIS crisis team
- Developing protocols in emergency response
- Training in QGIS, radar interpretation and other geospatial aspects
- Collection and organizing the data
- Identifying gaps in the datasets
- Spatial analysis such as hydrological analysis (since hurricanes and tropical storms do affect the Republic)
- Seeking support from international organization
The biggest challenge identified:
- Sustainability of the project. The concern is whether EIGEO and the project itself will continue in light of cutbacks of Australian aid budget
Changing Melbourne
The final presenter is a GIS analyst within urban planning company. His presentation was pulling publicly available 1945 imagery of Melbourne and overlaying with current imagery using Mapbox (his personal initiative). Basically, we got the chance to see the huge changes between post-war and current Mellbourne. The link is here.
Some quick overview changes we saw:
- Significant American military presence in Melbourne in 1945. Today, most areas has been converted to industrial or residential areas
- Former farm and orchard areas in Melbourne fringes have been converted to massive housing estates and Melbourne International Airport (Tullamarine)
Read more here.
Assetic User Conference
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| Assetic Board during the Conference |
Saroo Brierly
My company organize biennial conferences to bring our clients and partners to discuss and learn where our software is heading too. Although the focus is heavily on asset management and how the software are capable of solving your needs, GIS is not ignored in anyway. Part of the conference itinerary was an inspirational speech by Saroo Brierley.
Some of us has watched the brief story of Saroo. He was invited to our conference to present his story - the quest to see his long-lost family back in India. More importantly, the way he found his family was through memory maps and Google Earth. Hence, mapping(!) is so critical in removing the burden in his shoulder- where is his family.
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| Saroo and how Google Earth helped in his family search |
He got lost in a train to Calcutta (Kolkata) and he was adopted temporarily in orphanage. He was subsequently adopted by Tasmanian family and offering him the love and the family he lost. As he grew older, he had a burning desire to find his family. Using his photographic memory of landmarks of his suburb and his train journey, he began to search in atlases where his family resides. As time proceeded, Google Earth began to help him though internet (up to 2011) was very slow. With advent of broadband internet, he began to ramp up his efforts in tracing exactly where the village was.
Finally, one morning, he received a big surprise. He has nailed his area in Google Earth and found the name of the town. He contacted the FB administrator of town to verify the name of his birth area. After receiving correction, he organized flight to India. He arrived in his town, struggled a bit to find his old home and he wasn't sure whether he was in the right town. Finally, after talking to locals, he found his old home and met his mother for the first time in 20+ years! It was an emotional story for the audience who were listening
Location Analytics
A senior ESRI Business Manager spoke at the conference the importance on leveraging location in areas of asset management. ESRI has a vision of enterprise collaboration and encouraging data sharing within the clients.
She stressed that location is very important aspect in our lives. More so, the next 5 billion internet users may no longer use desktop PC to access internet. Hence, the organizations like councils and ESRI need to build scaleable apps to accommodate the new need and approach to internet.
She mentioned in Australia up to 67% of the population use smartphone, nearly 15 million internet users and each Australian (those who access internet) use up to 3 devices to access internet. Plus, commercialisation of IT meant our home internet experience will brought across to our work places. Hence, we need scaleable apps
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| ESRI presenter on ArcGIS online and integration with predictive conditions of roads |
She stressed once more than spatial data is critical for organizations and government functions. Maps are vital for our progress and no longer under pure GIS/geography domain. She also demonstrated how ArcGIS Online helped the local government to visualize the road conditions in the next 10 years.
This concludes my report today
