Enterprise GIS Projects

The Virginia Tech Police Department is developing a prototype of an interactive, searchable incident map using GIS and other geospatial visualization applications.  Integrating geospatial information and visualization provides effective new tools that can enhance the ability of law enforcement to meet strategic, tactical and administrative goals. The ability to query, compare, display and analyze complex spatial information about incidents and physical environments on campus can help enhance university safety and crime prevention strategies.  The ease of use for an array of visualization tools and techniques means that law enforcement officers can use the resource immediately, without additional training or instruction.

A potential outcome of this project is a publicly available web enabled online interactive campus map that can be used by the VTPD and other university departments to relate important information to the university community such as; snow emergency routes,  road closures and other traffic and parking information, construction, bus stops, bike lanes and more.  Eventually, other technologies such as sensors, GPS devices, and other visualized data can add new functionalities for enhancing public safety and crime  prevention.

The Information Technologies Security Office is enhancing their cyber security capabilities by incorporating geospatial technologies into their diagnostic and assessment efforts.  Geospatial tools and technologies can enhance IT Security Office’s ability to identify trends and vulnerabilities and locations of cyber-events and environments on campus. Using GIS and other geospatial tools to efficiently assimilate, and manage discrete data sources, improves the ability to strategically analyze and communicate cyber conditions that may impact network users. Incorporating a geospatial approach IT security practices can help to transform a complex array of data into coherent visual representations that can effectively inform the university community about cyber events and threats that can adversely affect network performance.

Virginia’s Region 2000, (which includes: includes the counties of Amherst, Appomattox, Bedford and Campbell, the cities of Bedford and Lynchburg, and the towns of Altavista, Amherst, Appomattox, Brookneal and Pamplin) and Virginia Tech’s eCorridors group are developing a prototype of a vertical asset inventory tool using GIS and other geospatial technologies. Vertical assets in this context are structures within a locality (tall buildings, silos, smokestacks, water tanks, existing communication towers, etc)  that wireless Internet service providers can use to deliver for the delivery of services, A geographic based inventory system will allow localities to quickly enter, search, sort, display, and retrieve data that can  facilitate private sector and local investment in rural broadband deployment. This initiative is funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Secretary of Technology Productivity Investment Fund.

Virginia Tech Facilities Information Systems (FIS) is using the Enterprise GIS as their hosting provider for all campus infrastructure data. Facilities was the first organization outside of IT to begin using the Enterprise GIS system, back when it was still a prototype. When the FIS department was created, the strategic decision was made to migrate the campus infrastructure data from CAD to GIS. The Virginia Tech "campus basemap" is made up of dozens of layers, each maintained by different departments within Facilities. Each department needs to be able to update and maintain the layers in their areas of responsibility, while also ensuring that the other administrative departments have access to the most current data. Enterprise GIS provided FIS with an environment to securely aggregate data from all the departments it serves, while ensuring that access is restricted to "need-to-know" personnel.Facilities currently has over 90 users in the Enterprise GIS ArcSDE system, representing 14 different departments. Users are grouped by database roles into departmental units, and privileges are granted in a manner that matches Facilities' business processes. Multi-user editing is supported through versioning in ArcSDE, and FIS reviews all edits before they are posted to the DEFAULT version. By using the Enterprise GIS, Facilities improves its ability to ensure that the university's internal operations are guided by the most current infrastructure data.

Enterprise GIS is assisting Virginia Tech's College of Natural Resources in the development of web-based mapping and spatial analysis tools for modeling and quantifying Ecosystem Services. In particular, the department of Forestry is interested in quantifying the carbon sequestered in the nation's forest biomass. A number of tools, many of them computationally intensive, have been developed to model Ecosystem Services, and Enterprise GIS assists CNR by helping to integrate tools running on a variety of computing platforms into industry-standard web GIS interfaces. By working with Enterprise GIS, CNR is able to focus on the development of the models and tools specific to their research, while hosting is centralized on the Enterprise GIS server infrastructure.

The Enterprise GIS team worked on a number of projects for Aneesh Chopra, the former Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, including a web-based map integrating an open-source Internet speed test to enable Virginia's K-12 public schools to test their Internet connections and identify areas of need, and a similar map for the Commonwealth's libraries.

Multiple projects are underway from the Virginia Cooperative Extension. In the Northwest District, extension agents are taking advantage of the Enterprise GIS system to build web-based maps illustrating the effects of different forestry techniques employed in demonstration plots at the Shenandoah Agricultural Research and Extension Center. These maps will offer a new, interactive format in which Extension can further the dissemination of best practices. At the Alson H. Smith, Jr. AREC, researchers are interested in using the Enterprise GIS system as the backend for a web-based disease forecasting system for grapes.

The Agriculture, Human and Natural Resources Information Technology (AHNR-IT) organization within Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences is working with Enterprise GIS to transition the data management of the VAES Weather Mesonet to a centralized server environment, and to integrate these data with other spatial data. When the transition is complete, weather data from these stations will be an additional resource available to Virginia Tech researchers through the Enterprise GIS. In addition, Enterprise GIS is working with AHNR-IT and the Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences department to assess the feasibility of providing a centrally accessible spatial analysis and geoprocessing server, which would provide computationally intensive GIS and remote sensing analysis not currently economical for individual departments to support individually.

The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, Virginia Tech's largest research center, relies on the Enterprise GIS team to assist in the design of spatial database systems to store and visualize millions of GPS locations collected by instrumented vehicles. Enterprise GIS works with VTTI to develop spatial analysis methodologies relevant to their research, which presents a special case study in scalability, as many of the Institute's datasets are exceptionally large.

Enterprise GIS is working with staff from University Relations to integrate the centrally stored and regularly updated campus basemap from Facilities with the next generation of the Virginia Tech Campus map. This project is still in a prototype phase, but it is anticipated that through this collaboration, future iterations of the campus map will be more dynamic and kept current through realtime links to current campus infrastructure data.

Enterprise GIS is supporting a project led by Sunil Sinha in the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering to map the nation's water infrastructure and make it accessible through the creation of a Water Infrastructure Information System. The enterprise GIS team created a custom database solution for this project by linking a locally hosted instance of ArcSDE to a remote database at the San Diego Supercomputing Center. In addition, Enterprise GIS is hosting and assisting in the development of web applications to help create intuitive interfaces to massive amounts of water infrastructure data and also analysis tools for assessing the condition of assets.

The Virginia Tech department of Entomology is working with Enterprise GIS to spatially enable a number of databases they maintain for tracking the spread of the Gypsy moth, as well as the development of prototype web mapping applications for the tracking of the Hemlock Woody Adelgid.