Keeping Up With Cloudpoint
“It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.” - Scott Belsky
Another WATERCON has come and passed, but what a show it was! Bill, Jon, Matt and even Sahara put in time at the booth during the show, and it was a good thing all of us were there, as the attendance was fantastic. Billing themselves as one of the premier conferences relating to water and waster water systems in the Midwest, the number of attendees, educational sessions, and vendors proved it.
The Town of Normal, IL is taking great strides in its GIS progress under the leadership of two highly talented professionals. IT Director, Teri Legner and GIS Coordinator, Cassidy Killian are currently working with the water department to update all of their old maps. The water distribution system is currently all mapped out in CAD however it is not exactly to scale, causing a huge challenge when trying to convert to GIS format. Normally a simple georeferencing process can stretch or rotate the old maps to fit, however in this case it was not a practical approach due to the scale variance.
Cloudpoint was brought in to help with this process consisting of referencing old records such as pdf valve cards, construction drawings, and CAD data to reconstruct the data in a GIS environment. The newly converted data will be in Esri's local government data model and can be easily integrated into all of the latest Esri tools, maps, and apps including the Water Utility Network Editing and Reporting tools which are freely available to the Town as part of their current Esri licensing. Soon the GIS department will be able to use this new GIS layer for water distribution applications such as valve isolation traces, reporting, and customer outage notifications or boil orders.
As-built record drawings were scanned to pdf and used for reference in constructing the GIS layers
Water main details are incorporated into the GIS which can later be used for system-wide analysis and reporting.
Having Trimble GeoXH units on hand will allow the water department staff to further "fine tune" their data and collect GPS information with greater accuracy. The professional staff at Normal has displayed great insight in migrating their data to the GIS environment and using the resources they have in place.
