The Risks of Spatial

The world of Geospatial is, like any other technology, going to have some inherent risk. Part of making a program stronger should be looking at those risks and planning strategies to mitigate them. This article covers risks and mitigations in three sections, Program, Technology, and Operational, then wraps up with a recap and final thoughts.

GIS for Small Cities – Step 3: Data Storage

The 3rd part in the GIS for Small Cities series looks at data storage options from a number of different perspectives. How data is stored affects everything from how many people can access your data, to how, and in what forms, you can display or visualize your data.

Asset Management Systems and GIS: Some procurement considerations

During a recent weekly Twitter chat about GIS, a GIS industry colleague asked for some thoughts about selecting and planning an Asset Management System. That question sparked a discussion between Nathan Heazlewood and myself. What follows is an expansion on that discussion. This post looks at the reasons and requirements for implementing an Asset Management System; what software you might use, whether COTS or a custom system, and how to get started. Finally, we wrap it up with a discussion of the need to have buy in from your supporting departments, the need to work with subject matter experts to determine what assets are important, and lastly, the need to keep it simple. Only do as much as you need, with the knowledge that you can add more as you go along.

Tip of the Day – Ensure you have a Unique Identifier for each table in your database

Today’s Tip Ensure that you have a unique identifier attribute for each table in your database Discussion This is another tip that arises from me doing a task, and realizing I forgot something critical. In this case, the task involved creating a table, trying to perform an operation on said table, and encountering an error or limitation due to a …

GIS Enabled Database Part 1 – MySQL

The first step in putting together an open source suite of GIS software is to install some sort of storage medium for your spatial data.  There are many options out there, ranging from the ESRI personal geodatabase, which uses a Microsoft Access database, to a fully relational database management system like PostGreSQL with PostGIS.  Each post in this series will …

QGIS – Vector Data Connection

Update – April 2017 Many things have changed with QGIS over the last few years since this post was written. I thought it worth the time to revisit the topic and expand its scope. Please take a look at my new post: QGIS – Loading Data —————– One of the major differences between many COTS applications and Open-source is in …