Today's Progress 10/23

I finally got an email back from Kurt Olmsted about the data I had requested in his department. The Mecklenburg GIS team now has the 911 data and the master address data, and today I got access to their database of information.

This should prove useful, especially if the scope of the project increases in the future. I also have building footprint data for the entire county that I will be able to use as contour layers for buildings.

We have also been working on this automation problem. Jianfei and myself are currently working to come up with a solution. I am strictly using GIS while he is using analytical tools in a program that he is writing. I am hoping that we can come up with a solution to fix these time consuming issues.

Todays Progress 10/23

Today I have been separating the Atkins library files into their specific classes. I now have for each floor a poly, stairway, and elevator file that has been separated into their specific classes.

For the time being I am not going to manually add room numbers. This is because we are coming up with a new method to assign this type of data that will hopefully make the process much easier and automated.

For next week I hope to incorporate this automation so that we can have a complete set of files for Atkins Library.

Today's Progress

Today I updated COITVISCENTER.uncc.edu, which is serving as our backup database with all of the new shapefiles, and geodatabase files. I need to start archiving things on a regular weekly basis now that we have much more data to store and handle. It would be critical if anything was lost on the local machine, which is where the majority of the source data is at.

Another thing I did today was email Kurt Olmstead, who is the directory of Mecklenburg County GIS services. I asked him for some help with this research project and if he could provide any relevent data for us. I met him earlier this week when he gave a presentation to our class and let me know that his department is now over theE-911 and MAT data for the county.

I am still awaiting an email back, but hopefully something good will come of this.

New effects and changes to NIJ Analysis program

Jianfei has made several changes to the NIJ Analysis program. One thing that has been added is a indicator of a fire by displaying animated smoke. Later on we are hoping to have thematic additions for chemical spills, floods etc. A screenshot of this smoke effect is displayed below.


Another addition that has been made is an airplane that can be dragged around the map to see the contents of a specific building. This will allow you to see the detailed view of the building by simply putting the airplanes light beam on the specified building. Later we hope to add more effects such as placemarks and possibly terrain. A screenshot of the airplane effect is displayed below:

Completed Atkins Library Files

I have finally geo-referenced and aligned all of the CAD data for the atkins library files. I now have everything converted over to geodatabase polygon features.

The next step will be to annotate and seperate the polygons into their respective classes and later create the hallway line and line junction files.

Now that this step is completed the rest of the conversion process should be much easier.

Here are some screenshots of the library displayed in ArcScene with 60% transparent layers:

Create New Postgres Users and Database Maintenence

Procedure for creating a new postgres user with proper attributes:

Use either:

CREATE ROLE name LOGIN;
or
CREATE USER name;

(CREATE USER is equivalent to CREATE ROLE except that CREATE USER assumes LOGIN by default)

Some Important Attribute and Privilege Changes for Users:

to allow database creation for user:
ALTER ROLE name CREATEDB;

to set a password for user:
ALTER ROLE name PASSWORD 'password';

to grant/revoke public access on a table or database can replace ALL with select, update, delete, etc:
GRANT/REVOKE ALL on tablename to user;

Database Maintenece and Backup Procedures:

Performing an SQL dump and retrieving the dump(generates SQL files for all tables in database and dumps to a outfile for backup):
pg_dump dbname > outfile;
psql dbname < infile;

or use:

pg_dumpall > outfile;
psql -f infile postgres;

Performing VACUUM maintentence to recover disk space and update database statistics:
VACUUM ANALYZE;
or just VACUUM;

Reindexing:
REINDEX;


These tasks should be performed every week to make sure our system is backed up and running optimally.

Project Update 9/19/2008

This week we have been working on finishing the implementation of hallway segmentation and multi-desktop connections.

I have finished updating the woodward and cameron files with hallway polygons so that we can facilitate blocking/segmentation. This seems to be working well and Jianfei has implemented these changes in his program. We now have the capability to choose polygons and block them off, as well as stairways and elevators, and entrances.

The issue of multi-desktop connections works in theory, the only problem is we have not been able to connect to PostGIS remotely at the moment. However, we have been able to make changes on two program running on the local machine and were able to see dynamic updates when a section of the building has been blocked off. Next week we should be able to fix the remote connection problem so that we can log in and change things from another machine.

Progress of digitizing the atkins floorplans is very slow at the moment, currently I only have the polygon data converted from CAD. I have been experimenting with different spatial transformation algorithms to line the data up but them keep coming up very skewed. I have since went back to my old method of manually identifying a building footprint and aligning all other layers to this contour file. I hope by next week I will have a final model of the building to put in the database, and in subsequent weeks I will begin the process of identifying polygons and annotating them for use in our program. Then the last step will be creating the hallway networks, which I am very unsure about because of the complexity of this building.

Here is a screenshot of my progress digitizing cameron, this is the first floor:

Changes in Mid-level abstraction and segmentation. Change in line file data model...

We have decided to change the way we are handling the mid-level abstractions for the program. We have ditched the idea of trying to derive our own segments arbitrarily, and opted for a method that will hopefully allow well-defined segments with a better way to select/block segments of hallway.

What we have decided to do is incorporate hallway polygons into our displaying layers that will define segments of the hallway. These segments have already been defined, and are derived from the CAD files. Each of these polygon segments (see Fig.1), and their corresponding line files will be labeled with a "SEGMENT_ID" that determines which segment a hallway line file belongs to.

These well-defined hallway polygons will also be used to allow the end user to select large "chunks" of hallway and block them off, or view more detail about a particular one. The problem we were facing before was defining hallway segments, and which corresponding line segments from the line files to include.

Due to this change in our abstraction method I have changed the Data Model for the line files that correspond to each building level.

The new model includes the following attributes:

OBJECTID
SEGMENT_ID
BUILDING
WEIGHT
flr_num
COMMENTS
SHAPE_LENGTH

Figure 1:


This screenshot details the hallway segmentation that we will be using, the selected area is a well-defined segment.

Project Update 9/5

This week we have been working on a method to facilitate the course-level abstraction we have been discussing. For now I am manually identifying different segments of the building that will be separate in Jianfei's course level model. These segments of the building can be blocked off or displayed separate from their constituents. In the future we hope to make this segmentation feature automatic, but for the sake of time I am manually identifying and labeling them for use in our demo. Progress on a demo is nearly complete and we should have something to present by early next week. We are also striving to have communication to the database established between multiple clients in order to facilitate external changes to the DB. I have also started converting the Atkins library files over to GIS data and the final product should be available within a couple of weeks. I am detailing the steps I go though to convert the data to what we need for this project, and I will provide a document detailing the steps and completion time for them. This document should provide a basis for the process that will be required if we move to automated conversion of this data. Another avenue I am exploring is the use of Archibus data in place of CAD files. Our campus supposedly has Archibus files for each building on campus and judging from this article: http://www10.giscafe.com/nbc/articles/view_article.php?section=CorpNews&articleid=500611, et al, this data can be incorporated into ArcGIS very easily now. I have emailed Fred about access to the Archibus system and the details of this kind of data, I am just awaiting a response.

New CAD files

I have finally received the new CAD files for the library. Throughout this week I am going to be starting the process of converting them to use in our project. I am also going to make a detailed description of how I convert the data so in the future we may move to an automated process for this.

Some other things that are going on is segmenting Woodward hall and also finishing up some scenarios/demo that we can show off.