November 17, 2009 – Anything Geospatial

ZoomAtlas is offering what they refer to as a “Wiki style” service that enables registered users to leave notes at places from their past and connect these notes with their facebook account. At first glance I found the mapping service to be very impressive (the street maps with footprints are much different than anything you’ve likely seen before). But do I really want to leave a trail of notes at houses where I once lived or places where I worked… or as they put it, do I want to map my life? For me that’s just a little too creepy and a little too much information to share publicly… I guess you can be the judge for yourself – on the upside its a very clever app with a cool UI although I’d have to think that privacy issues will slow this service from taking off – and if that doesn’t slow things, how about the people on the image found on their homepage.. what the he#@ are those people doing?? . See ZoomAtlas.com or more information HERE

An interesting GIS event in Texas… The city of McAllen, Tex., is planning to throw their own GIS Day “party” on Friday, Nov. 20. McAllen has integrated GIS into multiple facets of its operations, and the City is leveraging GIS Day as an opportunity to showcase how it views the future of geological, geographical and civil sciences applied to government. Members from Accela will join McAllen on-site to present a compelling overview of the enormous impact that mobile GIS can have on the operations of local governments.

Accela’s GIS Product Manager, Brian Wienke will join Jose Peña, one of McAllen’s lead programmer analysts, to present an overview of how their GIS-infused Accela applications (including Accela GIS and Accela Wireless) have been deployed to great effect by various departments – including Engineering, Planning, Inspections, and Fire. In particular, McAllen’s Code Enforcement operations have completely turned around with the advent of Accela Wireless, which includes embedded ESRI ArcGIS Server Mobile ADF.

NET RESULT: From a creaky, paper-based system in which each case took nearly 30 days to close out, McAllen has graduated to a fully automated, Web-based system that boosted processed code-enforcement cases by more than 80% in one year. The city of 130,000 now is on track to process more than 10,000 cases this year. Not only that, but the new system helped McAllen quickly recover from a direct hit my 2008’s Category 2 Hurricane Dolly, which damaged over 150 buildings in the city.