NW WA GIS User Group Presentation

The NWWAGIS User Group meeting in Bellingham on Friday was really great. There were lots of interesting people to meet and talk with (including a client I had not yet met in person!), some excellent presentations, and lots of good discussion.

An impromptu presentation by Greg Sutherland of San Juan County was particularly noteworthy--he showed a YouTube clip of a demo the PPI Group did for San Juan County Public Works. They showed up on the 10:00 am boat, drove their special data collection vehicle around Friday Harbor for a couple of hours, and prepared a demo by 1:00. They collected multi-angle high-resolution photos (similar to the Google StreetView photos) and a very dense LiDAR point cloud. The end result? Engineers are able to take measurements of rights-of-way, cross walks, stop signs, utility poles, you name it, all from a street-level photo. I think the video might be 'invite only' since PPI is courting San Juan county as a client, but once I find the link I'll post here.





My talk seemed to go fairly well, and I received some positive feedback afterwards and lots of helpful suggestions about some of the trickier analytical questions. Here is a PDF if you would like to check it out. Many thanks to Dan Siemann and all of the folks at the National Wildlife Federation for asking me to work on this interesting project, and the Mountaineers Foundation for providing some of the funding.