Tree inventory system

This doc very much under construction; in fact not even really a doc yet. More of a stream of consciousness.

Brian Wilson 12:48, 23 February 2006 (PST)

Overview

Ultimate goal: Create a complete tree inventory system for the City of Corvallis.

notes on tree inventory systems

Reality: Break the project down into several manageable and useful subprojects.

Field requirements

Data collection by interns/contractors. Needs to be fast and simple.

Access to all data in field for work crews and arborist.

Management requirements

Basically this is an asset management system integrated with GIS. It has to be able to do the usual GIS stuff plus tracking plus reporting.

Although this is possibly the most important component I am relegating it to the back burner for now.

Implementation

Integrate open source and proprietary components.

Data collection field component based on a customized ArcPad on a PDA.

Advanced version either a portable ArcMap or ArcPad on a laptop.

Optional Bluetooth GPS

Server component

Mapserver (or ArcIMS) based application

We have ArcIMS available, but I lean towartds the opensource mapserver since basing the server component on free stuff brings down the final price by 50% should it ever get used anywhere else.

If I build it on a mapserver base I can test it out on top of shapefiles and then transition to PostGIS system, which should give much better performance for queries.

I want a user to be able to browse to an area of interest on a web-based map interface, and then use the currently viewed map to define the extent for queries, reports, and export to ArcPad.

I've looked at ArcPad project files, and this really seems pretty doable.

This means the checkout of data could be done without a copy of ArcGIS being involved.

more

Populate database This is an ongoing task but the goal is to have enough usable data in the system to prove that it works. (Also to test out and prove that the field collection systems work!)