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Tuesday 18 October 2005: Session 1, 1:30:00 PM
Building a Geocollaborative Crisis Management System for the Pennsylvania State University
Presentation Abstract
In the Fall of 2004, the GeoVISTA Center at the Penn State Geography department partnered with the Office of Physical Plant (OPP) to develop a web-based GIS that supports crisis management tasks. In addition to producing detailed campus data layers to support University Park campus emergency scenarios, a goal of this work was to provide a workflow for translating CAD drawings into a GIS schema that could be maintained without significantly increasing the workload of updating two separate databases. Members of the GeoVISTA Center worked closely with the OPP staff (in particular the CAD designers) to understand their requirements to update drawings for both building floor plans and external infrastructure and land use features. The resulting emergency response GIS for the University Park campus provided a multi-modal interface for some common navigation and query functions. This paper will discuss some of the initial challenges of keeping a tight linkage between a detailed and well-maintained store of CAD drawings that are continually updated and a GIS that provides important analysis capabilities previously unavailable. Some of the new capabilities include the ability to view floor plan data and query estimated building occupancy at a particular time. We will discuss the integration of the resulting GIS data into a geocollaborative crisis management system.
Speaker Biographical Information
Scott Pezanowski : GeoVista Center, Penn State
Scott Pezanowski is a research staff member at the GeoVISTA Center located within the Penn State Geography Department. A Penn State alum, Scott also holds a M.S. in Geography from the University of South Carolina Scott is a developer of GIS and web applications and has contributed to a number of ongoing research projects including the GeoCollaborative Crisis Management system.
Dwayne Witmer : Penn State Office of Physical Plant Facilities Resources & Planning
Facilities Resources & Planning, Penn State Office of Physical Plant Dwayne Witmer is a designer for the Office of Physcial Plant in the Facilities Resources and Planning group. This group maintains the CAD drawings for all campuses in the Penn State University system. Dwayne's work using pocket PC's to update drawings was recently profiled in the May 2005 issue of Cadalyst along with fellow designer, Scott Hord.
Michael Stryker : GeoVista Center, Penn State
Michael Stryker is a candidate for a Masters in Geography at Penn State with interests in GIScience and in particular geovisualization. Working as a research assistant for the GeoVISTA Center during the previous academic year, he encorporated recommendations from the University Emergency Response Coordinator and data from the Office of Physical Plant to create a campus emergency response scenario for the GeoCollaborative Crisis Management (GCCM) system. Michael has also continued to work for the OPP through the summer on a campus GIS.
