The Project
It has been quite some time since I posted, which was not my plan, but between work and this project, I haven't had as much time to write here as I had hoped.
Alberta Dispositions
The Alberta government website says the following about dispositions:
"A disposition is required by law before entering onto or initiating any activity or work on 'public lands' unless specified as exempt in legislation (Public Lands Act: Sections 20 and 47)."
- https://www.alberta.ca/when-a-disposition-is-required.aspx
Through this process, a large dataset exists detailing these dispositions as a polygon set that exists over the province, however as you can imagine what is sometimes planned back at the desktop in an office does not always hold true in the real world. Sometimes unseen obstacles require roads or pipeline access to be diverted for example.
The Problem
The spatial problem this project aims to tackle is to provide a means for users to locate these potential changes in the field with a low-cost solution using Esri technology. In a nutshell, our team needs to provide a web-based app that will allow a user to compare the original disposition polygons to aerial or satellite imagery of what was actually built and provide them a way to create a new polygon that is associated back to the disposition layers.
Off-the-Shelf Solutions
In its most basic form, this involves placing the existing dispositions on a base map and allowing users to edit a new layer that stores a copy of the disposition number to relate it back. This mock-up was built by our team quickly to help understand the problem and potential solutions.
One of the key issues with a simplistic solution is that a disposition with the identifier, "MLS00012212", might easily be entered as "MLS001212", and now we have a break between the original disposition layer and the footprint layer. It is clear some data validation would be required.
Project Asks vs School Requirements
Another thing to be considered is, does this project meet the requirements of the capstone project, and does it demonstrate a strong enough knowledge about the majority of the previous course work? As it stood we did not think that it did, but with the addition of some reporting ideas to summarize potential area changes being recorded, it would check enough of those boxes. Overall this project demonstrates our group's knowledge of:
- Cartography
- Database design
- Arcpy programming
- Web-based GIS
- Project management
- Statistical analysis
Next Steps
With the problem defined the project group was ready to tackle the first part of the project phase: Planning. This aspect of the project, and the focus of the next article. will be laying out the project schedule, quality controls, data management, and the definition of the project risks.
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