Greg Bunce: Welcome to another episode of the Utah Geospatial Podcast. This is Greg Bunce.
Matt Peters: And I’m Matt Peters.
Greg Bunce: And we’re from the Utah Geospatial Resource Center. This podcast will be bringing you Geospatial news from across Utah.
Should we just roll through the top here?
Matt Peters: Yeah, let’s just roll.
Greg Bunce: I’ll let you kind of talk about the logo because I think you put a lot of energy into this.
Matt Peters: Today on the show we’ll be discussing a smorgasbord of topics and happenings from around the state. So bring your appetite and your notebook. And keep in mind the show notes will have links to where you can get more information on any of these topics. So here we go.
So we got a logo.
Greg Bunce: And we got a name change.
Matt Peters: Yep. So speaking of new things Greg, what about the logo? Have you seen the latest logo of UGRC?
Greg Bunce: I have seen the latest iteration. I know there was a few iterations, but I’m liking the latest one.
Matt Peters: Yeah, so we went out on the web and used a company called DesignBro, and even you for a few hundred dollars can have a new logo. It was a very interactive process and what we ended up with is really growing on us. And I think the most important thing to say is the show notes are going to have a lot of information in them. So please look in the show notes. We’ll keep a link to the logo there as well as a link to many other tidbits of information that we’ll be discussing today.
Greg Bunce: And is that going to be the first unveiling of the logo? Maybe in the notes here? Or because I know eventually we’re going to get it into the website, but that’s probably a few weeks out still.
Matt Peters: Yeah, the website’s a little time out but we do have a draft version of a newsletter that will be going out very quickly that has the logo in it.
Greg Bunce: And maybe hopefully some stickers for the folks who make it down to Bryce Canyon at UGIC.
Matt Peters: Yes, for those folks we will have stickers.
Greg Bunce: Okay, perfect. Yeah, so then Hexagon imagery. Any updates there?
Matt Peters: Yeah, so it made me laugh this morning, but I was told that the end of the flights would be in the middle of August. And when all of a sudden I saw the weather today, I’m like, really? So I’m sure there might be some issues where they needed to fly at a different time or delay or maybe they got it finished before the latest round of smoke. But definitely today, the 6th of August, is not friendly for photography.
Greg Bunce: No, for those who are listening later down the road, it’s a very smoky day here in the Salt Lake Valley particularly.
Matt Peters: Yeah, and so we do have… they are wrapping up the flights though. 6-inch for the state and we look forward to making that available for folks.
Greg Bunce: Right? So that’s 6-inch statewide?
Matt Peters: Statewide, yeah. This is back to the old days of when we had 6-inch Google imagery statewide.
Greg Bunce: And this is annual?
Matt Peters: No, so this is just 2021. And so in a year, our contract with Hexagon imagery will be expired and we will need to renegotiate terms and conditions and products for the next few years. That’s why I’m happy that we have a three-year contract. So now with so many advances with so many other companies, we just got to keep our eyes open about what may be available in the future.
Greg Bunce: The other thing I think worth bringing up is maybe Matt you can give us some updates on GISAC. And that acronym… that is a long one. Utah Geographic Information Systems Advisory Council.
Matt Peters: Yeah, but we don’t say the Utah otherwise it’d have to be U-GISAC.
Greg Bunce: Good point.
Matt Peters: The GIS Advisory Council. Geographic Information Systems Advisory Council. So based on the UGRC strategic plan, it was recommended that we get the council going again. And I kind of said, “Okay, good idea. I can do that.” And then I just got lost in the weeds exactly what the GIS Advisory Council should be. But I have finally come to an epiphany that we should put together a variety of groups, committees. Some exist already. They should be like a federal interagency group where state and local and federal folks talk about common issues or problems with federal data or problems with state data. I know Greg you’ve been heading part of that up lately. An overall statewide surveying and mapping advisory group or committee. And then the new datum also needs a committee. It already exists actually. And so these different committees will all give the GIS Advisory Council a wide and deep look at GIS in Utah and what needs to happen, what is going wrong, what is going right. And I feel like having all these committees out there and giving them kind of assignments, kind of seeds to start their thoughts, will help Utah as a whole. And will involve a lot of people. I mean we’ll even have a local government committee and I hope to engage people from Utah Association of Counties because you think we get data from address points, we get road centerlines, we get parcels, we get land information records. All that information being fed up to the state. And also state agencies feeding their data into the State Geographic Information Database. So every other year, NISGIC folks put out a report that has this, that is this Geospatial Maturity Assessment. And then it can also be used to inform things such as the Geospatial Data Act, which you’ll probably hear more about in the future. But it lets everyone know in the United States, well I guess the world, but within the United States like each state where they are with their GIS data.
Greg Bunce: Yeah and I think like you said, it is a great assessment of how we’re doing as a state. A bad grade doesn’t necessarily mean a bad thing, it means that that’s an area where we can improve. But like you said we have done quite well. In fact I think in 2019 we scored up there at the top with the other states who were at the top. We had a B+ and you can check this out, I’ll put a link in the show notes on that was our overall score. And then they kind of break that down into there’s a transportation theme, elevation theme, a cadaster theme and you can kind of see how we did as a state there. It’s nice to see where we did well but it’s also great to see where we didn’t. And I’d have to look closer at it but it kind of shows us areas where maybe we need to collaborate better and work together better.
Matt Peters: Yeah, and times change. What was an important layer one year might not be as important at the next or our focus can change. So it’s great to have a good set of partners that we can remain flexible and call on the various partners to provide whatever is needed.
Greg Bunce: That’s true. So there’s some redistricting and census related news and some of it’s as relevant as yesterday. But UGRC, as many of you know, we kind of serve out the census data and that was released this year. The geographies of that data. And we work with the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute to kind of coordinate some of this stuff. And they help us kind of gather what the schema should look like and how to basically what’s needed in the data. Because there’s so many fields and there’s so many aspects to census data. And they’re kind of focused on what’s valuable in there. And that data so far released has been the more or less the geography data. And the big hold up kind of has been, well the pandemic has kind of put us in a spot where we weren’t… the demographic data such as ethnicity, race, voting age, and housing occupancy… that data’s kind of lagged here for a bit and that hasn’t been great because basically this data is needed for redistricting at the state levels.
But anyway, the good news is they announced yesterday… so originally they were thinking mid-August for some of the files to come out and then September more of the usable set of data was going to come out. And that I think the September 30th date still stays. But basically they announced yesterday that August 12th they’re going to be releasing some data to folks who are a little more savvy with using databases and they can pull out stuff. There’s examples on how to do that. But the data that they’re releasing is the stuff that needs to be used for redistricting. And it’s typically known as the Public Law 94-171 data summary file. And they’re population counts and stuff. And that’s primarily used to do the congressional districts. And now we have an Independent Redistricting Commission here in the state and they’ll be doing the congressional district lines and then the state legislative lines. So they’re kind of on hold until this data comes in and normally it would be here by now. But because of the pandemic and other things that we won’t get into deeply here, there’s been a hold on that. So I think that’s kind of exciting news that it’s coming. Typically the national elections happen every even year. So that really puts the crunch on it. For next year, for 2022, the boundaries they’re going to be drawing now are going to be used in the 2022 election. So a little bit of a pressure there. But stay tuned. We’ll work with the State Data Center which is the Kem C. Gardner Institute to get that data rolled up into the stuff that we have currently out on the website, which is the geography is the tracks, the blocks, the block groups, but we’ll start to add some of this more valuable demographic data into there. So stay tuned for that.
Matt Peters: Wow. That sounds like a big deal.
Greg Bunce: Yeah, it is. It’s a mouthful but definitely worth for those who need it, worth knowing about.
Matt Peters: Yeah. Well, there is another thing that I think is pretty damn exciting in Utah from a geography perspective, from the perspective of the Utah Geospatial Resource Center, us, is that finally after 50 million, maybe it was a hundred million years, the data in the 911 centers is becoming centralized and available as a service to the Public Safety Answering Points.
Greg Bunce: Yes, long time coming. And again back to the theme maybe the theme of this episode is all everyone’s great work aggregating and bubbling up into these systems. And here’s another classic example of it. You have elections, you have 911. And this is another case where all these address points, these road centerlines, everything is feeding up into these state data sets that is now being put to more uses and relied on more heavily. And Next Gen 911 is all about GIS data. Literally that is what the driver. It’s the backbone. And as Matt said, starting now starting in late July and continuing to roll out here over the course of August is the PSAPs, the Public Safety Answering Points in Utah one by one are starting to now use this centralized data that everyone in the state is helping to maintain. And that’s the data that’s going to pull up on the map when a 911 call comes in at a dispatch center. So that has been huge news.
Additionally, there’s another side to Next Gen 911 and that is even before your call even gets to the dispatch center, excuse me, the GIS data is used even before that. And that’s in the call routing system. So if you place a call specifically from a landline, it goes into a server and GIS data at that point is going to use to say, “Okay, well where do we send this call?” The call routing. And that’s been another long time coming. Millions of years. We’ve been talking about this. And the exciting thing is September 21st the first PSAP is actually going to move over to this spatial routing. So the GIS data is going to say, “Hey, this call is coming from this address, send it over to this dispatch center.” And then their plan is to basically roll out a PSAP each week until March 2022. So the way I’m reading it is March 2022, if anybody who makes a landline call in the state of Utah, the GIS data is going to figure out how to get that where that call needs to go, to which dispatch center. And then as it gets to the dispatch center, that same data, which is a critical part that we’re not dealing with different siloed data sets all over, it’s the same data that they’re going to see on a map. So that helps, having one centralized data set. Like you said, I think is key here.
Matt Peters: Yeah, very true. So there’s some redistricting and census related news. And some of it’s as relevant as yesterday. But UGRC, as many of you know, we kind of serve out the census data.
Greg Bunce: I think we’d be remiss though not to mention taxes. Since we’ve got 911, we’ve got elections, and then taxes. So the address points are used for the Streamlined Sales Tax system. Nick out at Tax does GIS analysis so he knows how to build the table that various online companies will use to figure out the tax that a Utah citizen must pay.
Matt Peters: When you order something online right?
Greg Bunce: Yeah. Yep.
Matt Peters: Have to figure out where are we sending this product and what tax zone are they in. So yeah, good point.
Greg Bunce: Yeah, or centrally assessed taxes such as for a railway, what counties and districts does their rail line cross.
Matt Peters: Yeah, that’s huge. I think just bridging the non-GIS folks with the GIS folks. I think that’s the next wave of all of this for all of us. Is getting in the same room and doing exactly that because we are starting to speak the same language in so many aspects.
Greg Bunce: Let me say one other thing. Since we’re talking about how data feeds into these larger systems and how we’re all contributing to this. Elections is kind of another area where this is happening. We aggregate all these precincts and we use our geocoders and we use the address points to locate where does a voter live and what ballot should they get. And the GIS is kind of continually playing a larger and larger more critical role in that. The state is now using a vendor to manage the state voter database. But GIS is a heavy player into that system and just kind of pointing out here that we’re running things like we’re looking at address points to see are they in multiple precincts, what kind of discrepancies are out there. Are we putting a potential voter in multiple precincts? Do we have gaps in the precincts? Do we have potential voters who won’t get a precinct or they not currently assigned to a precinct? So just kind of highlighting again how much is happening in the world of GIS at a larger level. We may get focused on managing our data for a certain specific use, a localized use of it, but really this is bubbling up into so many things and I think the key is that we’re all working with the same data. That we’re not recreating the data here at a state level. That we’re working with the local’s data. Because then we’re all on the same page.
Matt Peters: Yeah I notice though when we were talking about GISAC and perhaps data standards and different things and you I know have been working on kind of like what data is important, kind of Data Tiers. What tiers what treatment that data gets. What can you tell us about that?
Greg Bunce: Yeah, exactly. So I think one of the ways, you know we have a couple of hundred data sets in the SGID and it can get wild in there. And I think one of the ways to kind of classify them or break it up is to say let’s break it up into tiers. And the current thinking now that we’ve done is we’re going to break the data sets up into four tiers. And that really helps us kind of define what level of effort goes into these data sets and what we can expect out of these data sets. So the current thinking again is four tiers.
And the first tier being basically like framework data. And we got a little checkbox grid going and I’ll put it in the show notes. But really if it’s going to be a Tier 1 data set, it really should meet this level of qualifications. Such as is it complete? Does it have updates? Does it have a steward? Metadata. Does it have quality checks on it? Is it an official record? So you know you can think of things like the county boundaries. That’s a classic Tier 1 layer. It’s an official boundary. It’s an official layer. It’s an official record. So it does meet that. So knowing that it’s a Tier 1 really helps us to say, “Oh, well since we know that it is a Tier 1 and classified as that, then it should meet X amount of updates a year, it should be complete and it should be run against all these checks.” And if it’s not, that’s where we need to improve.
Tier 2 is similar but it’s used for a little more broad decision making.
Tier 3 we start to loosen the grips a little for qualifications. But we still want to keep it in the SGID but it’s more programmatic data and maybe it’s important to a specific task.
And then Tier 4 is kind of just ancillary data that it plays a supporting role for something. It’s supplemental data. It’s in there. We want to keep it in there. But maybe we’ll loosen the grips on if it’s not getting an annual update or something like that. So that’s the efforts there with the tiers. Do you want to add anything? I know you’ve had a large role in this as well.
Matt Peters: I don’t know if I have anything to add, but I just want to eventually work this into a GISAC committee to look at agency data and make sure that we are getting the right treatment for the agency data that it needs. So people can expect the same thing across the board.
Greg Bunce: Yep.
Matt Peters: You know, I think the best thing is just to add two plus two and see that it still equals four.
Greg Bunce: Yeah, that’s probably a lot to digest in one episode.
Matt Peters: Yes, I probably do.
Greg Bunce: All right, well I think that went well.
Matt Peters: There you go. Another one in the books. Almost.
Greg Bunce: Yep almost. Yeah. You got it. I think that was great. I think we read the same page which was great. When you started off with Thomas Jefferson I said, “Ah, I think this is the page that I looked at.”
Matt Peters: Yeah, cuz I sure as hell don’t know that.