GIS and Mapping
Ric Skinner, GISP: Depiction Preferred Consultant Profile
Oct 17th
Depiction Preferred Consultants (DPC) are a great asset to Depiction and we’re happy to have them as part of the Depiction family. These folks offer services like training, project assistance and even full Depiction implementation to organizations interested in or already using Depiction. We’re writing a series of blogs to highlight the strengths of each of our DPCs to expand on the resources that support Depiction. This week we’re featuring Ric Skinner.
Ric Skinner of The Stoneybrook Group, LLC is a Certified GIS Professional with over 30 years of professional experience in hospital & healthcare preparedness, health geographics and environmental management. While The Stoneybrook Group is based in Massachusetts it is available to provides services and grant collaboration regionally and nationally. Ric is the book editor and a chapter author of GIS in Hospital and Healthcare Emergency Management. He is an active member of the International Assn. of Emergency Managers (IAEM), Urban & Regional Information Systems Assn. (URISA), and other professional organizations and their listservs. Following the old adage “if I give you a fish you will eat for one meal; if I teach you to fish you will never go hungry,” Ric’s consulting objective is to teach others how to use GIS to meet their needs for assuring that the right people, have the right information, at the right time and in the right format. While he has used ESRI GIS software since the late 1980s, he recognizes that many small organizations and budget-strapped municipalities cannot afford the investment of money and people for a GIS that has many features and functions they really don’t need. That’s why he now focuses on the “leaner and less costly” GIS capabilities that Depiction provides.
I have had the pleasure of working with Ric both virtually and in person. I appreciate his knowledge of GIS, healthcare and policy affecting both, and his desire to foster collaboration and effective use of Depiction. Ric is very enthusiastic about GIS (he has been called a “GIS evangelist”) and about Depiction, both in its current functionality and its potential. We have featured him in two Depiction Perspectives interviews (June 2010 and June 2011), and several blog posts.
For the past year or so, Ric has been working with Chris Floyd of Disaster Resistant Communities Group, to put on the Formidable Footprint online tabletop exercise series. He uses Depiction to produce interactive and static maps that illustrate the location and effects of the disaster for each innovative, free monthly event.
Please contact Ric Skinner via email with any questions and visit The Stoneybrook Group, LLC to learn more about his company.
Mer enn kartlegging
Oct 6th
Google Translate tells me that means ‘more than mapping’ in Norwegian, and hopefully it’s right.
The Depiction 1.3.3 Release Candidate became available this week, and one of the new features added is Quickstart data for Norway–two different topographic maps and a hydrographic map. If you use 1.3.3 to create a new depiction in Norway, you’ll see these new options
You may ask, why Norway? As nice a country as it is, this wasn’t an idea that came out of our own heads–a Norwegian user used the Depiction support forum to point us to a set of data services provided by the Norwegian Mapping Authority.
Quickstart data consists of publicly available data from governments and other organizations–and if you know of data that is being made available that you think we should take advantage of, let us know, either in the Depiction support forum or right here.
In the meantime, if you’d like to explore Norway a little further, download Depiction 1.3.3 and take a look!
National Preparedness Month: LANL uses Depiction
Sep 7th
National Preparedness Month is observed each September in the US. It’s a time when Americans take simple steps to prepare for the unknown. Depiction is partaking in this year’s event by featuring Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and how they use Depiction to prepare for such events as wild fire, potential security threats and scenarios on chemical leaks.
This webinar is free to attend! Alan Woodward, EOC Planning Sections Chief at LANL, will highlight several tabletop exercises, scenario simulations and take questions from attendees. This webinar is great for individuals, organizations and companies interested in preparedness planning and consequence assessment. Alan comments that LANL uses Depiction for its “ease of use, flat learning curve, professionalism and fast in-field collaboration capability”.
Attendees will learn how Depiction can be used to create simulations and facilitate ‘in the moment’ cooperation whether for a national laboratory, your neighborhood, fire department, police department, local government organizations or emergency field teams.
Alan Woodward joins us as our guest presenter September 22nd at 10:30am PST. He has worked in the Emergency Operations Division for 10 years as an analyst, emergency planner, and Section chief with over thirteen years experience developing geographic information systems (GIS) and GIS products. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Washington State University (in Physics) and a Master of Science degree from Oklahoma State University (in Plant and Soil Sciences). Currently, he is focused on developing GIS applications for emergency responders that can be used in an EOC or at the site of an emergency.
Also joining in to field questions and provide additional information are Rachel Hixson, Dave McClard and Bill Purtymun.
Rachel Hixson is a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialist with a Master of Arts degree in Geography from Arizona State University. She is helping to develop the GIS capabilities of LANL’s Emergency Operations Center. She has also been working on reverse plume modeling for a national bio-surveillance program at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) for three years.
Dave McClard works in the EO-EM Group as an Emergency Manager. Current responsibilities: Focus on response management, Emergency Operations Center (EOC) operability, planning and preparedness activities, communication operations, aviation operations, and wildland fire operations. Dave began emergency management work in 1986 as a search and rescue (SAR) pilot and search and rescue trainer. His last five years were spent as the State Emergency Services Director and squadron commander for an auxiliary of the United States Air Force.
Bill Purtymun originally became involved in emergency management as a Firefighter III/ EMT Paramedic. He graduated from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology with a BS in Geology. He has been employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1989, initially as a Site Safety Officer for a non-reactor nuclear facility. In the mid 1990’s he became a LANL Emergency Manager and Incident Commander for the Emergency Operations Division. For the past several years he has worked in Hazard and Consequence Assessment at the LANL Emergency Operations Center. In his spare time he volunteers with the local ski and mountain bike patrol and is a Nationally Registered Paramedic. He is currently working on his masters in Emergency Management through Arizona State University.
Join us on September 22nd at 10:30am PST to learn more about how your organization can be better prepared, cross collaborate more efficiently and benefit from the Depiction software platform.
Depiction Workshop at State of the Map 2011 in Denver
Aug 24th
State of the Map is OpenStreetMap’s annual international conference and we’re super excited to be a part of this year’s event held in Denver, September 9-11!
Join our Preferred Consultant, Russell Deffner on Friday, September 9th at 11:50am for a 40 minute workshop introduction to OpenStreetMap and Depiction. Hurricane Coast, VP of Sales and Marketing, and avid OpensStreetMapper will be there too!
We’ll work with the audience to create ‘what if’ simulations, table top exercises and demo new tools available with the latest release! Tickets are almost sold out, so be sure to register soon!
The entire weekend is chock full of fun map related events, talks and workshops with over 250 attendees from around the world. Check out the schedule for September 9-11.
OpenStreetMap is an integral part of Depiction. Using free, open source software is vital to our business. Plus, OpenStreetMap data is the most current, up-to-date available for both vector and road data. Come join us at the greatest gathering of open source map enthusiasts and learn how it can benefit your business or cause!
See you in Denver!
“GIS 101” whitepaper helps everyday people harness the power of GIS
May 23rd
As mapping technology progresses, more and more people are gaining the capability to work with geospatial data. To help everyday people make better use of this data, Depiction, Inc. today released the free whitepaper “GIS 101: Understanding Concepts and Terms,” outlining some very basic ideas and terminology used in the field of geographic information systems (GIS).
“Before inexpensive word processing software, the only people who needed to worry about things like ‘fonts’ and ‘margins’ were the experts,” said Depiction, Inc. president Richard Smith, primary author of the whitepaper. “And today, understanding concepts like latitude and longitude, or vector data versus raster data is important for more than just GIS experts. We hope that ‘GIS 101’ will be valuable to the many non-experts who are finding the increasing amount of publicly available GIS data important to their decision-making processes and responsibilities.”
To download the free whitepaper, visit http://www.depiction.com/newsletter and register for the Depiction Newsletter.
Depiction, Inc. makes Depiction mapping, simulation and collaboration software, which brings expert level GIS, modeling and other tools to everyday users around the world. Depiction 1.3 can be purchased risk-free and downloaded for just $199 at www.depiction.com, and requires no subscription or maintenance agreement. Volume discounts and discounts for volunteers are available.
Using a User-created Depiction Interaction Rule to Aid in Tornado Damage Assessment
Apr 15th
For our Depiction of the Week, we have a guest post from Ric Skinner, GISP, a Depiction Preferred Consultant.
I needed a simple way to do a damage estimate of a tornado path through a town for the Formidable Footprint Tornado tabletop exercise which will be staged on Saturday April 30. After placing a User-defined Shape on my depiction I noticed it looked a lot like a flood map. Knowing that the flood interaction rule interacts with specified elements to disable them if they occur in the flood zone area. So I created a “tornado path” interaction rule as follows:
1. I created a tornado path from the explosion element, deleting all the points not needed.
2. I saved the new shape to my element library, naming it “tornado path.”
3. I copied the flood interaction rule, renamed it “tornado path”, indicating the cause as “tornado path”, and checked the elements I wanted it to interact with – for this simple example just buildings.
4. Because I don’t like the clutter that the red “X” causes for disabled buildings, I created a separate layer of disabled (=destroyed, in my example) by exporting the buildings as a CSV.
5. I added a new field (attribute) named “Status”
6. I saved the file a “all building” to keep for backup.
7. I saved it again as “buildings OK” and deleted all records with “Active = False”. I added the value “No Damage” to the “Status” field. These are the buildings outside the tornado path.
8. I saved “all buildings” again and deleted all records with “Active = True”. I added the value “Destroyed” to the “Status” field. These are the building inside the tornado path.
9. Then I “turned off” the tornado path” interaction rule by un-checking the box indicating to use the rule “in this depiction”. This is so the interaction rule doesn’t run again when new building files are added.
10. I deleted the buildings layer (i.e., all the original buildings) in my depiction and re-imported the two new buildings files, using two different symbols indicating their status. Additional levels of damage were indicated in the Status attribute by manually editing each element.
11. Then using the new status value to filter certain buildings, the symbol outline color was specified to indicate “destroyed”, “major damage” or “minor damage”.
With the tornado path interaction disabled it is easy to see (without the red “X”) which buildings were spared and which were damaged, along with any additional hover text information desired.
Click here to download the depiction.
Depiction of the Week - Tracking Tornado Damage
Depiction 101: Simulation Elements Video
Jan 25th
Simulation elements set Depiction apart from most other mapping applications. With these customizable elements, users can explore a wide variety of potential scenarios and have a very good idea of effects on their community. Watch this video to learn the basics of using these unique pieces of Depiction.
http://www.depiction.com/files/videos/Depiction101/011911-Depiction101-SimulationElements.flv
Depiction: “Poor Man’s GIS” and much more
Jan 10th
Eric Holdeman, at Emergency Management Magazine’s Disaster Zone blog, writes about his time at the Puget Sound Depiction Users Group meeting last week:
If you have followed this blog at all you know I love the idea of maps and what they can do for you before, during and after a disaster. They create the picture of what exists and what might be in the future.
While GIS mapping has come a long way you still need GIS techs to help you in building your data sets and creating the layers of information that are useful to you…
I took one evening and went to a users group for novices like myself where we poked around on the system for two hours. I’m still not much of a techie, but I think if did invest some time in the software I could come up with some useful tools. They have some data sets included and you can import others from your local jurisdiction (think shape files).
There are probably other mapping systems out that can help you do what depiction does. If GIS is not available or too expensive/complicated, find something else that works for you. You may become the next Magellan cartographer!
I would, of course, demure on the idea that there are things out there that do exactly what Depiction does–though depending on your needs, of course, there may be other options that do enough of what Depiction does to get the job done. But Depiction’s combination of mapping, simulation and collaboration tools is unique–which is why Eric is exactly right overall. Depiction helps folks who may not be “much of a techie” to do things like building hazard maps, creating emergency plans and contingency plans for those emergency plans, getting and sharing situational awareness, collaboration, doing tabletop exercises and much more.
And that leads me to a second point–Depiction can certainly serve as a “Poor Man’s GIS,” and in this time of budget cuts, that’s a very good thing. It also opens GIS up to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access. See this article for an example of Hampshire, a very small town that now has capabilities that were far out of their reach before (since the article was written, they have indeed gotten themselves Depiction).
But Depiction is more than that–I like to think of it as the Swiss Army Knife (or, if you prefer, the Leatherman) of mapping tools. If you could only afford one tool, that’s the one you would get. If you can afford and use more powerful and specialized tools, then your Swiss Army Knife isn’t going to stop you from doing that. On the other hand, you’re still going to want that knife on hand. You couldn’t swap out a car engine with just a Swiss Army Knife, for example–but you’re certainly going to want one nearby!
Depiction, with it’s flexibility, ease of use and small footprint, is like that. It’s a tool both for the non-techie volunteer and the tech savvy professional, and most folks in between. Take a look at our emergency manager webinar from September for examples of how different folks, with similar responsibilities, but different technical capabilities and situations, all use Depiction.
Thanks to Eric for the excuse to write about this, and for coming up last week!
Earthquake in Indiana
Dec 30th
A magnitude 3.8 earthquake shook Indiana just north of Indianapolis this morning, apparently causing little damage. Read this article for more details. The USGS has data posted here, though it apparently hasn’t been reviewed yet. This makes the Formidable Footprint (January) and Great Shakeout (April) exercises coming up seem very well timed.
I downloaded the USGS shapefile and did a quick depiction of the MMI (a relative intensity index). Indianapolis is to the south and Fort Wayne to the Northeast in this image.
Depicting the epicenter and relative feel of the quake
Drop me a line if you’d like more info on how I depicted this.
Depiction encourages all our staff, readers and users to prepare for the hazards in your area. For more info, visit Ready.gov.
Have a safe and happy New Year!
“We Need It Bigger”
Dec 3rd
I had the good fortune this week to attend the first EOC (Emergency Operations Center) drill in Anacortes, WA. The GIS manager for the city, Rob Hoxie, has designated Depiction as their EOC mapping solution, and asked me to join him in the EOC.
The planning committee spent the last two months putting this drill together. As I understand it, most of the city staff has ICS training from FEMA, so this drill put that to the test. The Fire Chief acts as the EOC director, as the city does not have an emergency manager. The scenario for the 4-hour drill was a 30-inch snowfall over 3 days, which takes out the power and home phone service for the entire city (pop. 16,000). In preparation a member of the planning committee put together a Microsoft Access database to record events and track resources. Rob also put together 2 depictions of the city: 1 with all the events in it and one “blank”. I copied those files to my computer and used an email account to send events from the full depiction to the empty on via Live Reports, as Rob placed events “manually” as the scenario unfolded. Both processes worked well, and his became more effective when the internet and cell service went out in the scenario (the IT guys killed internet and I disconnected my wireless card). Rob also made use of the “Bring to center” button in the Manage content menu to make the newly placed events flash on the screen.
One of Rob’s hopes for the event was to bring attention to the depiction, which was projected on a 5′ screen from the ceiling. For the first hour or so, not many people took not, but by hour 3, folks in the front, middle and back of the room were consulting the depiction. Their main comment? “We need it bigger!” With 34 events on the map, many flashing and text shown to describe them, 5′ was not enough space. They’ll be looking into buying a 10′ screen.
A clipping of the events simulated in the drill
This was a very effective drill, and I was impressed by the dedication, attention and knowledge of the staff. I was also glad that one of the outcomes was a decision to move away from the 5-copy carbonless-paper form to report events to the room, hoping instead to provide each area of expertise with access to the ICS database to view and update events. Depiction could also help, and I will be working closely with Rob and his colleagues in coming months to help this happen.
