Albert Sarvis, Assistant Professor of Geospatial Technology & Director HU Geospatial Technology Center, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology 

Craig Lewis, Geospatial Lab Manager, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology 

Henry L. Garie, Chief Data Office and Geographic Information Officer (GIO), City of Philadelphia 

Presenter Biography: Hank Garie serves as the Chief Data Officer and Geographic Information Officer (GIO) for the City of Philadelphia.  Hank directs the CityGeo/CityData program located in the Office of Innovation and Technology.  This program coordinates GIS activities across more than 40 City departments and helps support the integration of spatial and non-spatial data for daily operations and citizen services.

Prior to joining the City in March 2019, Hank served as the first GIO for the State of New Jersey and directed national GIS initiatives in the U.S Department of the Interior.  Hank also served as President of the National States Geographic Information Council and as a member of the National Research Council’s Mapping Science Committee.

Presentation Abstract: GIS has become an integral decision support and analysis tool for the City of Philadelphia.  Over 45 departments including, water, police, planning, fire, health and many more use place-based analysis and applications to manage daily City operations and emerging issues.  Hundreds of spatial data sets can be easily coupled with tabular data using an Enterprise data warehouse (DataBridge) and over 2,000 users access ArcGIS on-line to build problem solving applications.  At the center of the action is CityGeo, a team dedicated to coordination, governance, and Enterprise geospatial services.

Insights into how the Nation’s 5^th largest City effectively integrates and manages GIS into all aspects of City government will be shared by Hank Garie, Philadelphia’s GIO and Chief Data Officer.  Through a series of practical examples, the components that comprise the overall management approach for a successful City GIS program will be shared.

Technical Requirements: None

Christopher Jursa, GISP, GIS Manager, Washington County

Presenter Biography: Chris is a GIS Manager with a GIS Professional (GISP) certification and 18 years of GIS experience including system administration, developing GIS applications, managing enterprise geodatabases, managing online GIS portals and automating geoprocessing workflows with ArcGIS ModelBuilder and Python.  Chris have GIS experience in government, consulting and education, in addition to experience in engineering web sites, user interfaces and software with JavaScript, HTML, Java, Classic ASP with VBScript, PHP and ASP.NET with C#.

Presentation Description: While GIS data is commonly available in geodatabase feature classes and shapefiles, GIS-related data can exist in documents such as PDFs, web pages and Excel spreadsheets. If not formatted for immediate use, the data may be recovered in a systematic fashion using search patterns.

This presentation will describe how to access a document, extract text and search for consistent patterns of data with regular expressions in Python. Search patterns to extract letters, numbers and other characters will be described so that attributes such as parcel identifiers can be discovered. The goal is for the audience to see the flexibility of regular expressions to discover data to join to your GIS data as opposed to manual string extractions and other Python string operations that may require multiple lines of code.

Technical Requirements: Python 2.7, ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Pro, Adobe Acrobat, and Excel

Justin Schneider, Senior Software Developer, Rainbow Design Services 

Presenter Biography: Justin is a professional application developer by day and a hobbyist game developer by night. His passions include video games, VR, and communicating data spatially when words alone fail.

Presentation Description: With more in-depth GIS data available now than ever before, we can do so much more than draw flat maps and charts. This session will introduce users to set up a project using Unity, a free game engine, importing data, and rendering that data in a basic 3D scene.

Technical Requirements: No software is required, as this is an intro only. If following along, users should have Unity installed, and sign up for a free personal use license ahead of time.

James Whitacre, GIS Research Scientist, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Powdermill Nature Reserve 

Speaker Biography:  James Whitacre is the GIS Research Scientist for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History where he manages the GIS Lab at Powdermill Nature Reserve, the Museum’s environmental research center, and supports museum staff and affiliated researchers with geospatial technologies and needs.

Presentation Description: “My script takes too long!!” Do you find yourself making this complaint too often? Well, maybe your script would benefit from multiprocessing! If you’re not sure, this session will dive into what multiprocessing is, the different scenarios where multiprocessing workflows can help speed up processing, and how to practically utilize multiprocessing in ArcGIS. You will learn how to move from, “This is so slow…” to “WOW! That was fast!”.

Technical Requirements: ArcGIS Pro 2.5+, Jupyter Notebook, Python 3; Python Code Editor; ArcMap and Python 2 may work, but will not be tested.

Chris Saylor, MS, MCTS, GIS Applications Developer, JMT Technology Group

Presenter Biography: Mr. Saylor is based out of JMT’s Harrisburg office and brings GIS and full-stack web/desktop development experience. He specializes in GIS-related development, with years of experience authoring applications that utilize the Esri platform as well as with open-source mapping technologies, such as Leaflet and GeoServer. Chris is also a certified Hyland OnBase API developer.

Presentation Description: Web applications with a mapping component have become increasingly popular over the years. With that popularity comes a growing number of options a developer has when choosing the client-side mapping API, the technology used to generate map layer image tiles, and the back-end storage of spatial data. This sits on top of the other choices a developer must make when writing any web application, such as client-side frameworks (Angular/React/Vue), server-side frameworks (.Net Core/PHP/Django), object-relational mapping libraries (Entity Framework/NHibernate/Dapper) and choice of the database (SQL Server/Oracle/PostGRES). Selecting the correct combination of technologies can be an overwhelming task and the rate at which technology changes can make an application seem obsolete shortly after a release to production.

In 2016, JMT was tasked with writing a web mapping application for Pennsylvania One Call System, Inc. The purpose of the application is to allow users to create projects that will require digging or excavation. The application enables users to draw project boundaries on the map or import a boundary from an uploaded shapefile. This spatial data is saved to the database along with other non-spatial attributes. JMT recently upgraded the application to a “latest and greatest” technology stack. Additionally, we added a RESTful API that exposes most of the CRUD operations available within the application. This provided a rare opportunity to rewrite the application from the ground up, incorporating best practices and patterns learned over the past few years.

This presentation will cover some of the pitfalls, pleasant surprises, and other lessons learned while performing the conversion and refactoring of existing code. The upgraded application uses the following technology stack: .Net Core 3.1/C# (server-side framework), SQL Server, NHibernate (object-relational mapper), Angular 9 (client-side framework), Leaflet (mapping library), Geoserver (map tile creation)

Technical Requirements: None

Jim Lawruk, Senior Web Developer, GeoDecisions

Presenter Biography: Jim Lawruk has worked as a professional software developer since 2002 specializing in .NET/C# and JavaScript. For the past six years he has worked at GeoDecisions, a geospatial technology solutions firm. He has extensive experience with ESRI’s ArcGIS API for JavaScript including versions 3 and 4. He has been the lead developer on several geospatial related applications at PennDOT. He enjoys running and hiking, so check out his GPS routes on Strava.

Presentation Description: Learn how to collect coordinate data using the lap button from your GPS watch, transform and enhance the data into features, and finally display the results on an ESRI Map.

First, attendees will learn how to collect coordinates from all the data recorded by a GPS enabled watch. We will cover how to write code to isolate or filter out the coordinates corresponding to the laps. Then we will transform the coordinate data into features contained in a GeoJSON file. We will then create feature layers to be displayed on an ESRI map. We will cover loading the features into the ArcGIS Server as well as creating a JSON graphics layer without a server. Attendees will learn methods to customize the map and layers using various tools available in the ArcGIS JavaScript API.

Technical Requirements: The course is targeted toward developers or those comfortable reading and editing code. A full set of instructions and source code will be available for review on GitHub. The software used will include the ESRI ArcGIS API for JavaScript and Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor. Both are free to use. ESRI’s ArcGIS server will be briefly covered, but is not required to complete the instructions.