Water Utilities Blog

GIS Data Health Checks at CA/HI/NV Regional User

mmiller@esri.com — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:58:00 GMT

Are you attending the CA/HI/NV Regional User Conference in Redlands, CA March 7-8, 2012? The ArcGIS Data Reviewer team is offering free GIS data health checks focused on validating water/wastewater and parcel data. Industry experts will run an analysis on your data in a file or personal geodatabase and provide a report of the error findings (if any). Be sure to sign up ahead of time by sending an email to datareviewer@esri.com in order to ensure a spot. Please provide your name, organization, and preferred time slot.

February 2012 Team Water/Wastewater Meeting

hcrothers — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:25:00 GMT

On February 25th and 26th Esri’s Team Water/Wastewater Meeting will be taking place in Voorhees, NJ. This meeting is open to all who are interested in water, wastewater and stormwater GIS. The detailed agenda can be found here. For registration and additional information contact Christa Campbell.

The kickoff presentation for the meeting will be an overview and update on ArcGIS for Water Utilities from Esri and there will be a number of presentations from the water utility user community.

The Team Water/Wastewater Meeting is held twice a year, one meeting takes place in the winter at a water utility and another meeting takes place the Saturday before Esri’s International Users Conference in San Diego, California.

In the past this meeting focused on the creation and maintenance of Esri’s Water & Wastewater Data Models. As those data models have become part of the Local Government Information Mode l, the meeting’s focus has shifted from a workshop to a gathering for those interested in water utility GIS and series of user community presentations on a variety of topics.

A special thanks to American Water for hosting this year’s meeting, Critigen for sponsoring breakfast and EMA for sponsoring lunch.

December 5th Esri Mid-Atlantic Water/Wastewater Special Interest Group Meeting

hcrothers — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:11:00 GMT

On December 5th, 2011 the Esri Mid-Atlantic Water/Wastewater Special Interest Group will be meeting in Hunt Valley, Maryland. This meeting is free to attend and is taking place the day before the Esri Mid-Atlantic User Group Conference. We hope you’ll join us at the Special Interest Group meeting and then stay and attend the MUG Conference. Lunch at the meeting is provided and graciously sponsored Platinum Esri Business Partner Azetca Systems and their Cityworks products.

The Esri Mid-Atlantic Water/Wastewater Special Interest Group is for the water, wastewater and stormwater ArcGIS user community in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Washington D.C., West Virginia, New York City, Long Island and surrounding areas.

Space is limited, so sign up for the meeting here: http://events.esri.com/info/index.cfm?fuseaction=seminarRegForm&shownumber=15294

The full agenda for the meeting is:
9:30 am – Registration
10:00 am – Greetings & ArcGIS for Water Utilities, Esri
10:30 am – Public Facing Applications for Water and Wastewater Utility Stakeholder Engagement, Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC)
11:00 am – County and Utility Collaborative GIS , Allegany County, Maryland
11:30 am – ArcGIS Online for Water, Sewer and Stormwater utilities, Esri
12:00 pm – Complimentary Lunch Sponsored By Cityworks
12:15 pm – GIS Centric Asset Management, Cityworks
1:00 pm – Water Resource Center to promote GIS dissemination, Harford County Maryland Public Works
1:30 pm – Roundtable Discussion & Closing Remarks
2:00 pm – Meeting Adjourn

We hope to see you at this meeting!

Expanding the power of the Attribute Assistant

mmiller@esri.com — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:40:00 GMT

Here at Esri, we always try to help one another out. Well the Local Government team asked if we could expand the functionality of the Attribute Assistant and make a series of construction tools to help with address data management workflows; and we obliged. We came up with some pretty cool new rules for the attribute assistant and some interesting construction tools that will be used to streamline address maintenance workflows. Even though these have been designed for managing address information, you may find them very helpful. Let’s first take a look at these new attribute assistant rules.

The first rule we needed to create was CASCADE_ATTRIBUTE. This rule will allow you to make a change to an attribute in a table or layer and push that new attribute value to every feature that contains the value. So in the address world, we have implemented a Master Street Name table. Say a road was renamed, we can go into the table, change the road name, and the rule will open up the Road Centerline layer and make that change to every road with the old name, then open up the Site Address Point Layer and update the road name as well. Pretty cool, huh?

The second rule we created was VALIDATE_ATTRIBUTE_LOOKUP. This rule will validate an attribute change against a look up table or layer. Let’s look out how you would use this in address land. If I created a new road and I want to make sure the road name matches a road in the Master Street Name table, I can set this rule up to monitor my Street Name field and check that value against the Master Street Name table. The cool thing about this rule is all I have to do is enter a piece of the road information. If it finds more than one record in the street name table, it presents a prompt, where you can select any of the matching values. How is that for data validation?

I also mentioned we are working on some new construction tools. These are still in development, but here is what we are working towards. One tool will allow the user to click a reference point, in our case, an address point that represents the location on the centerline of which the address is derived, create this point if it does not exist, then create a series of site address points with information from that reference point or the centerline underneath it. So basically, you can create a series of points all with information from source point. The second is a tool to draw a new road and split any intersecting roads and prorate their address information.

If you want to try the new rules out, as well as a few other enhancements, we have posted a beta of the tools on the forum.

Thanks
Mike from the Water Team

Join Esri at the California-Nevada AWWA Conference

ChristaCampbell09 — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 21:33:00 GMT

Esri staff will be attending and presenting at this year's California-Nevada AWWA Fall Conference.

Presentation:

"Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to Optimize Business Functions"

Presented by: Suzanne Timani and Katja Krivoruchko, Esri

Wednesday, October 19^th, 2011

1:30pm - 2:00pm.

Exhibit Area:

Booth #123

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

2:30pm - 7:00pm

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

10:00am - 3:00pm

California-Nevada AWWA Fall Conference

October 17-20, 2011

Grand Sierra Resort and Casino

Reno, Nevada

Benefits of the Local Government Information Model for Water Utilities

hcrothers — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:13:00 GMT

Why should a water, wastewater or stormwater utility adopt the Local Government Information Model?

Easier Deployment

One of the biggest benefits of a water utility adopting the Local Government Information Mode l is that it makes deploying the ArcGIS for Water Utilities maps and apps easier, faster and cheaper. The further you deviate from the Local Government Information Model, and in particular it’s geodatabase schema, the harder it will be for you to implement the maps and apps that are part of ArcGIS for Water Utilities. It will also be hard and time consuming to upgrade your ArcGIS for Water Utilities implementation when we release updates.

Changes you make to the Local Government Information Model schema may necessitate extensive modifications of the maps documents, and changes to apps (web apps, mobile apps, ArcGIS Desktop, etc.) that are part of ArcGIS for Water Utilities. So the closer you stay to the core Local Government Information Model, the easier your initial deployment will be and the easier it will be to migrate your ArcGIS implementation to new releases or to deploy updates to the maps and apps.

It’s also important to note that when we say “adopt” the Local Government Information Model we don’t mean that you necessarily have to use it as is (or more appropriately - as downloaded). You probably will need to configure the Local Government Information to meet the needs of your organization.   But the key thing to keep in mind is you should only be making changes to accommodate the true organizational needs of your utility. For example, instead of changing the field names to the field names you’d like to use in your organization, modify field and map layer aliases.   Bottom line, don’t reinvent the wheel, just make changes that are required to meet specific business needs in your organization.

At the very least you need to change the projection to the appropriate coordinate system and set up the domains to reflect the assets in use at your utility. Small utilities or utilities that are new to GIS may choose to take the Local Government Information Model as is, while larger utilities, mature GIS implementations, or GIS implementations that are integrated with other enterprise system will undoubtedly need to make more significant configurations or extensions to the schema to reflect their organizational needs.

Water, Sewer and Stormwater Data Modeling Best Practices

The Local Government Information Model incorporates many best practices for water utility GIS. One of the most important best practices is how to represent a water, sewer or stormwater system in GIS.

For years Esri had downloadable data models for water, wastewater and stormwater utility networks. Those data models were the first freely available water utility GIS data models. They were stewarded by Esri, but built by the user community and became the industry standard. Globally thousands of water utilities have built their GIS around Esri’s free data models.

The Local Government Informational Model is the next iteration of Esri’s water, sewer and stormwater data models. In essence we’ve modernized the data models to reflect how water utilities have been deploying GIS over the past few years and we’ve also modified the schema to fit the requirements of the ArcGIS for Water Utilities maps and apps. As water utility GIS continues to evolve Esri will regularly maintain the Local Government Information Model to keep introducing new best practices into the user community and functionality into our apps.

Comprehensive Data Model

There is no doubt Esri’s water, wastewater and stormwater data models were an incredibly valuable starting point for water utilities to get their utility networks into GIS. Since the original data models focused primarily on a data structure for the assets that comprise utility networks, we received feedback that many utilities wanted more guidance on how to model operational data (workorders, service requests, customer complaints, main breaks, capital improvement projects, etc.) and base data (roads edge of pavement, road centerlines, elevation data, parcels, etc.) in their GIS. The Local Government Data Model solves this problem because it includes a complete schema for typical water utility base data and operational data.

Over the years, an observation we’ve made is that water utilities struggle with how to model and manage schemas for datasets that aren’t their utility networks or operational data – simply put managing base data can be a challenge for water utilities. For example we’ve seen a lot of utilities struggle with managing roads, parcel, buildings, etc. in their enterprise GIS, especially when these datasets are coming from other organizations or departments.

This is a particular issue for water utilities that serve multiple units of local government such as authorities, county wide utilities, state wide utilities and private companies. A good example of this is a water authority whose service territory includes three counties.   The water authority needs parcel data that is maintained by the counties. County A, County B and County C all use different schemas for their parcels. So the water utility had two choices – leave the parcels in 3 different data layers and use them as is – which makes analysis, map creation and integration with other systems at the utility that need parcel data (such as a customer information system) difficult. Or invest time to extract, transfer and load (ETL) the parcels into a common schema so they can be used as a single seamless layer across the service area. The Local Government Information Model can now serve as the common schema in this example.

Easier Data Sharing

We describe the Local Government Information as a harmonized information model – meaning designed to accommodate typical GIS needs across local government. If organizations that commonly share data all adopt the Local Government Information Model, it will greatly reduce the time and resources spent establishing a common schema and migrating data to these schemas – thus allowing water utilities to focus on the maintenance and management of their authoritative data.

For example a private water utility may serve two municipalities. If the water utility and both municipalities all adopt the Local Government Information Model then they can all very easily exchange data.   When the water utility needs road centerline and edge of pavement layers from the municipalities than the utility can just import the new data without having to manipulate the schema and will have seamless layers for their service areas. The same logic applies to the water utility sharing data with the municipalities – when the water utility updates the location of their upcoming capital projects, the utility can share that data back with the municipalities and the municipalities can use it without any schema manipulation.

Best Cartographic Practices for Water Utility Maps

As we’ve discussed in a previous blog, the Local Government Information Model includes geodatabase schema, map documents and specification for services necessary to deploy the ArcGIS for Water Utilities and ArcGIS for Local Government maps and apps.

The map documents highlight best practices for displaying water, wastewater and stormwater data in the context that each map is designed to be used. For example the map documents included with the Mobile Map Template have best practice cartography for displaying water utility GIS data in the field in both a day and night time use map. The same goes for the map document included with the Infrastructure Editing Template – this is a best practice map document for editing water utility data with ArcGIS Desktop.

Looking to the Future

The specification for the services (map, feature, geoprocessing, etc) necessary for the ArcGIS Water Utilities maps and apps are also part of the Local Government Information Model. So if other local government entities in the service area of water utility embrace the Local Government Information Model, ArcGIS for Local Government and start to publish services, then water utilities can consume those services for their maps and apps. In this scenario the water utility may no longer have to import some data into their own geodatabase and can just consume the services right from the organization that is the steward of the data.

We hope you’ve found this exploration of some of the benefits water, wastewater and stormwater utilities will experience when adopting the Local Government Information Model helpful. We encourage your feedback on the information in this blog, the Local Government Information Model or ArcGIS for Water Utilities.

Come Visit Esri at WEFTEC

ChristaCampbell09 — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:36:00 GMT

Esri's Team Water/Wastewater is going to Los Angeles.

This year’s conference is October 15-19 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Lori Armstrong, Global Water/Wastewater Industry Manager and Srinivas Suryanarayanaiah, Esri Database Services Group, will be in booth #1059 to answer your questions about Esri's GIS technology. You will also get to meet seven of our business Partners: Trimble, Spatial Wave, DHI, Critigen, Westin, ID Modeling and Marshall.

WEFTEC is a great event that must not be missed. Stop by and say “hi”.

See you in LA!

Fall Esri Water & Wastewater User Group Meetings in California

hcrothers — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:00:00 GMT

There will be 2 Esri Water/Wastewater User Group meetings taking place in California this fall. The Northern California meeting is October 31st at East Bay Municipal Utility District and the Southern California Meeting is November 1st at Los Angeles Sanitation District.

Both meetings will have speakers from the user community, Esri business partners and Esri. The Esri Professional Services Database Team will be at both meetings doing data “health checks”. The health checks include automated checks on your data to help you understand your overall data quality. There are limited time slots for the health checks, so send an email to Suzanne Timani to register for a health check - stimani@esri.com

Northern California Esri Water/Wastewater User Group Meeting
Monday October 31 – 9:00 AM – 12 PM
East Bay Municipal Utility District
Board Room, Second Floor
375 11th St
Oakland, CA

Registration Website

Agenda:
9:00 – 9:15 – Introductions
9:15 – 10:00 – Migrating Water Distribution Data to ArcGIS – East Bay Municipal Utility District
10:00 – 10:15 – Break
10:15 – 10:45 – GIS Integration for Underground Infrastructure Assessment – CUES Inc.
10:45 – 11:30 – ArcGIS for Water Utilities Editing Template: Getting Started – Esri
11:30 – 12:00 – Discussion

Southern California Esri Water/Wastewater User Group Meeting
Tuesday November 1 – 9:00 AM – 12 PM
Los Angeles Sanitation District
1955 Workman Mill Rd
Whittier, CA

Registration Website

Agenda:
9:00 – 9:15 – Introductions
9:15 – 10:00 – GIS 2.0 at the Los Angeles County Sanitation District -
10:00 – 10:15 – Break
10:15 – 10:45 – GIS Integration for Underground Infrastructure Assessment – CUES Inc.
10:45 – 11:30 – ArcGIS for Water Utilities Editing Template: Getting Started – Esri
11:30 – 12:00 – Discussion

What is the Local Government Information Model?

hcrothers — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 17:54:00 GMT

The maps and apps that comprise ArcGIS for Water Utilities are built around the Local Government Information Model, so we thought it would beneficial to explain what the Local Government Information Model is in this blog and in a follow up blog explore its benefits for water, wastewater and stormwater utilities.

We’ll start by breaking down the term Local Government Information Model into two parts “Local Government” and “Information Model”.

Local Government

ArcGIS for Water Utilities is a module of ArcGIS for Local Government. ArcGIS for Local Government is organized around typical services or functions of a local government – water, sewer and stormwater utilities, public safety, land records, public works, etc. From a GIS perspective, no matter what type of entity a water utility is – a municipal department, an authority, part of a county, part of national government, private or a public private partnership, the scale of the data necessary to effectively map and manage your utility is similar to the scale of GIS data used by other local government entities. Simply put, water utilities need local scale GIS data.

The feature classes and feature datasets in the Local Government Information Model are “harmonized” meaning that they are designed to work across and support typical functions of local governments without duplication and redundancies. This enables municipal departments, functions within an organization or entire organizations to manage data that is specific to their domain and utilize data from other domains within local government as base data.

If you look across a typical city enterprise GIS implementation that encompasses all of a city’s departments, what you’ll notice is that the “operational data” of one department is often “base data” for another. For example the parcels maintained by a city’s land records department are typically base data for the city’s water utility. The water utility may use the attributes of the parcels for analysis or may join a table to the parcels with water utility specific information. Another example is the GIS features of a city’s storm water system that are maintained by the water department but are used as base data for the city’s 411 system that is managed by the city’s public works department. It’s important to point out that when we say “base data” we don’t just mean the data is used as a base mapping layer, it can be used for analysis or can be extended by the utility (in the example of joining a table of utility created data to a parcel data). Data not maintained by the utility is used as base data to provide perspective but can also blur the lines and become operational data when used for analysis or joined to information maintained by the utility

The same logic applies to water utilities that are authorities or private companies. Some of the layers they use for base data typically come from other local units of government (cities, towns, counties) within their service territory.

Information Model

We are using the term Information Model because this is more than just a data schema. In the GIS realm the term “data model” has commonly implied a schema or database structure only. The Local Government Information does include a schema, but we consider things like the Map Documents for our maps and apps and specifications for services to be part of the information model as well.

We are including Map Documents in the Local Government Information Model for two main reasons. First the Map Documents for our maps and apps are built upon best practices for each particular type of map. For example in the Mobile Map Template the .MXD documents have been designed to show best practices for building an interactive water utilities map for field crew use.

Secondly the maps and apps are built specifically for the geodatabase schema that is part of the Local Government Information Model. What this means is if you change the underlying schema to better reflect the true organizational needs of your utility than depending on the changes made you may have to modify any map documents that use that layer. Since you use the Map Documents to publish services to ArcGIS Server than the same logic applies for including services in the Information Model. The schema, the map documents and the services are intertwined.

Free Webinar - "GIS Solutions for Sewer and Stormwater Professionals"

ChristaCampbell09 — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:27:00 GMT

Learn how you can use Esri tools to improve data development, data management, and data visualization on desktop, web, and mobile platforms.

Attend a free webinar hosted by Lori Armstrong, Esri’s global water and wastewater industry manager, and staff from Critigen, an Esri Platinum services and solutions provider.

Critigen will show you a series of case studies that demonstrate how Esri technology can benefit your water utility.

Tuesday, October 11 11:00 a.m. - noon (PDT) http://bit.ly/waterwebinar

Release Candidate of the Infrastructure Editing Template Tools

mmiller@esri.com — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 18:15:00 GMT

We posted an updated version of the Editing tools today. This update has an only a few visible changes, but we did a lot of work to the plumbing of the tools. We condensed a series of duplicate functions, streamlined some of the processes and removed one of the dlls which was causing issues on non admin installs. We also did a bunch of clean up to better manage memory and improve stability.

Since we are supporting multiple config files now, we also changed the name of the config file that is being used to Loaded.config. If you have a config file you have created, let the tools create the new Loaded.config file and port your changes into it. There are a few new tags that we want to make sure you have. You will find it easier to navigate to the config file location with the Config file tool on the Infrastructure Reporting Toolbar. We also included a Bat script that will copy a config file to the appropriate location and open the folder for you.

We included a new copy of the Dynamic Value table with an updated Value Method domain. You should look at manually adding the new rules to your domain or importing the one included in the NewDyn.gdb.

I will be working on updating the docs and hope to have them all posted later this week.

For all the details, check out the change log included in the beta thread.

Thanks

Mike from the Esri Water Utility Team

http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/20000-Beta-Versions

Another round of updates - Infrastructure Editing Template

mmiller@esri.com — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:33:00 GMT

Hope everyone on the east coast made it through the hurricane ok. We lost power for a few days here at the Water Team headquarters in the Philadelphia area. The down time allowed us to crank out another release of the IET. We spend the time working on tools to help you move assets from proposed to in-service, in-service to abandoned, etc.

One new tool you will see came from a UC request and thought it would be a good start for this toolset. This tool allows you to reassign all connected assets to a main to a new main. Very simple, select the main that is going to be abandoned, select the new main, and all taps, laterals, valves, etc are moved over to the new main.

We also added a new rule to the Attribute Assistant - MOVE_FEATURE. This rule monitors a field and when that value of the field matches what is listed in the value info, the feature is either copied or moved to the target feature class.

Lastly we are working on a python script to move feature also. This script looks at the selected features, copy’s them to a target featureclass and sets the source features name in a field. We might look at building an ArcObjects tool to do the something similar, but expose a few more options in the configuration files. Maybe the python script can load the same config file.

Not only did we add a few new tools, but we also made a bunch of internal bug fixes and enhancements to improve the stability and functionality of the toolset.

Thanks for you feedback on the last weeks post. Please keep it coming.

Mike

What do you want out of an Abandonment Toolset?

mmiller@esri.com — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:59:00 GMT

If you have not noticed, we have been making a lot of improvements to the Infrastructure Editing Template or IET as some of you have been calling it. We have been working through the enhancment requests that we recieved at the UC and have released most of them through the Water Utilities Forum Beta Thread. We have one very important improvement left that we need your help on. We are looking to build a set of tools to help bring infrastructure from a proposed status to an in-service status and tools to move features from in-service to an abandon status.

Here are the tools we are thinking of so far.

1: A Geoprocessing script or model to change the status of selected features.

2: A Geoprocessing script or model to move a feature from one feature class to another and update some attributes.

3: A tool to select an existing line, select a new line and move all features to the new line(taps and laterals)

4: A tool to select two locations on a line, junctions or edges, split the line if required, run a trace between them and copy or cut each feature to a new feature class.

Would the above toolset allow you to manage the life cycle of your assets better? If not, what are we missing? Should we add any additional steps to these tools?

Please let us know through the forum entry on this topic linked below.

http://esriurl.com/3075

Thanks

Mike Miller

Hydraulic Modeling and GIS

ChristaCampbell09 — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 19:49:00 GMT

Check out the new Hydraulic Modeling and GIS video http://bit.ly/hydroModelvideo

The intent of the video is to introduce the Esri Press publication, Hydraulic Modeling and GIS, which will be released this November. The video will provide an overview of GIS-centered concepts and applications that will help utilities understand and improve hydraulic model structures, advanced spatial analysis, network connectivity and topology, hydraulic model development and maintenance strategies, and GIS database design. The video is geared towards GIS managers, analysts, engineers, and decision makers in the water and wastewater utility industry.

Team Water/Wastewater Meeting

ChristaCampbell09 — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 17:54:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated in this year's Team Water/Wastewater Meeting! It was a great way to kick off the User Conference and it was nice for me to meet many of you.

Presenters this year were: South Australian Water Corporation, Hampton Roads Sanitation District, Louisville Water Company, Global Water Resources, Greater Cincinnati Water Works, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities, and Black & Veatch.

Presentations have been posted on the Esri Team Water/Wastewater web page.Thank You to IBM for sponsoring breakfast!

If you missed the meeting this year, be sure to attend next year, because registration is FREE and it’s a great way to stay in the loop, or as a forum to showcase your own work and solutions with GIS and Water Utilities. If you would like to be on the meeting invite list for next year, please contact Team Water/Wastewater at iswater@esri.com.