In this paper Dr. Pine explores how a geographic information system (GIS) can be used to assist emergency managers in planning for and responding to emergencies. This includes creating situational awareness and common operating pictures.  Of course we think Depiction software is a great affordable and easy to use tool for Emergency Managers.

http://www.mapcruzin.com/

http://www.diva-gis.org/gdata

Background Tiling Sources

As you may or may not know, Depiction is not in the data business. Depiction was meant to be a mapping platform that could easily bring in available public data sources and then allow the end user to add their own data.  We attempt to find public sources for QuickStart data to help folks get started easily.  We also use these public sources for our background tilers.  One of the sources we used for several maps was the Microsoft Research Map site know as Microsoft TerraServer.   They provided the following background tiling sources: usgs black and white, usgs urban, usgs topo.

Unfortunately they are going to stop providing these feeds effective May 1, 2012 and so in anticipation of that we have removed USGS Black and White and USGS Urban. We have other imagery sources that are just as good if not better than these. Unfortunately we haven’t found a replacement for the Topographic map and so we are going to leave it in for the moment.  If you use this source a lot we recommend that you zoom and pan the areas that you use a lot in order to get these tiles in your cache. Around May 1st we will be releasing a new version (1.4.1) of the software that will have the TOPO background tiler removed since new customers would not be able to get any tiles from this source.  We will also hope to release a free add-on for those that want to continue to use the TOPO tiles in your cache, that will allow you to still use them.

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.

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!

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.

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!

“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.

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

Click here to view the embedded video.