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Monday 17 October 2005: Session 3, 11:30:00 AM
Provisioning PGDSS using OpenSource Tools
Presentation Abstract
The emerging Pennsylvania Geospatial Data Sharing Standards (PGDSS) is the guideline for intergovernmental sharing of spatial data in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. PGDSS recommends a common structure and format in which GIS data is to be made available from its point of origin and maintenance. Existing and/or planned intergovernmental and regional GIS efforts are encouraged to adopt these standards in their projects. GIS data as currently maintained are often structurally different between counties and even among county departments. Existing procedures for maintaining data may be tied to vendor supplied software/data solutions that are not shared across various levels of government. Also, these data maintenance solutions may not (because of expense, established workflow needs, etc.) lend themselves to alteration in order to accommodate the structure adopted in the PGDSS. The standard itself anticipates the use data translation routines for moving data in and out of the PGDSS format. Ideally, GIS data will need to be provisioned in the common PGDSS form in a way that (1) does not interfere with existing data maintenance procedures, (2) is accessible to all levels of government without creating additional expense, (3) is reusable (can provision the data in the same way from its original point of maintenance at any time going forward), and (4) can do so non-interactively. This example project demonstrates the manipulation, processing, and conversion existing GIS data (building points and centerlines) into PGDSS form using freely available Open Source tools. Highlights include construction of theoretical and actual address ranges and projecting linear referencing measures (LRS) onto centerlines from disjoint point data. The PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org)/PostGIS (http://www.postgis.org) spatially enabled database management system is used for server-side processing. Client visualization include Quantum GIS (http://qgis.sourceforge.net).
Speaker Biographical Information
Eric Randall : Erie County Department of Planning
Eric is GIS Database Admin/Analyst at the Erie County Department of Planning. He holds a BA from the University of Toronto and MS from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is an advocate of the adoption and use of open source software technologies in all tax and donor/contribution driven organizations. He believes that 2005 is a watershed year for open source software in general and open source GIS in particular.
