As a result of this great collaboration between city staff and residents, Nanaimo has gained an invaluable resource. Apart from the obvious benefit of showing downtown Nanaimo off to the world, this new level of completeness gives City staff an amazing resource to use for three-dimensional planning and analysis.

Have a look at this cool movie highlighting the community’s hard work:

If the stars align correctly, I will be speaking about this experience at GeoWeb 2010 later this summer. Hope to see you there!

-J

If you’re anything like me, you probably use the password reset function on websites more often than the login function. This is a huge problem, both for security and for user experience.

The City of Nanaimo recognized that as useful as the city’s web applications are, requiring citizens to remember yet another password is not reasonable. Early this year the city did an initial analysis of OpenID, and Jeff Jacob–one of my colleagues–took on the task of developing the infrastructure to support OpenID and one of the first applications to take advantage of it. You can read the everyman’s description of Nanaimo’s OpenID initiative along with links to the OpenID-enabled services.

While the majority of users probably have an OpenID account already, it would not be responsible to require citizens to sign up for an external login service. A mix of forms-based and OpenID login capabilities may have been easier, but it just made more sense for Jeff to implement a city-specific OpenID provider using the DotNetOpenID open source library. This allows Nanaimo’s application login class to be more streamlined while presenting a consistent user experience, but more importantly it allows the city to act as a provider for third party / COTS web applications as these start supporting OpenID. Eventually Nanaimo citizens will be able to log into all city services using a single ID of their choice.

It is gratifying to see that during the City’s implementation phase many other organisations, such as the US Federal Government, have been embracing OpenID. Allowing citizens to access services using their own credentials is a key part of Nanaimo’s longstanding policy of providing easy access to the information residents and businesses need to live and do business here.

If you work for a local government and are interested in sharing information and/or code, please get in touch with Nanaimo’s IT department!

-J

P.S. As always, I am writing from a personal perspective. Opinions here are my own, and are not necessarily shared by my employer.

If you’ve got a few minutes to play with it, please join us here:

NanaimoMap Beta

It’s in beta because of the issues that will likely be shaken out by more widespread use, and because we have not yet built out the layers and search functionality required to match our current MapGuide 6.5 ActiveX-based mapping portal CityMap. This will be completed before the end of the year.

Thanks!

-J

P.S. This application was developed by DM Solutions Group. We’re running Fusion 1.1 with the latest test build (r4114) of MapGuide. We wouldn’t have been able to launch–even in beta–without some last minute fixes by Trevor Wekel of OTX Systems and Haris Kurtagic of SL King. From a personal perspective, these guys are both amazing to work with, moderately priced for the value they offer, and are great resources if you’re stuck with a problem in MapGuide core that you can’t fix on your own. As always, the opinions offered on this blog are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.

You can visit the Nanaimo Public Art Inventory on the City’s website, or view the art directly in KML (Google Earth) or Google Maps.

One of the neat things about this is that if you’re running Google Earth 5, you can see the Microsoft Seadragon AJAX zoomable images inside the KML pop-up balloons. Jessica had to jump through some hoops to get this to work properly in multiple versions of Google Earth and in Google Maps but I think the result is worth it. For this, she borrowed heavily from some of the techniques used by Sean Askay of Google Earth Outreach in his Map The Fallen application.

Here are a couple examples of the art pieces included in the inventory:

A Thousand Fibres (View as KML)

Admiral of the Fleet (view as KML)

Way to go Jessica, and the City of Nanaimo Parks Recreation and Culture department. Full press release available here (pdf).

-J

The City of Nanaimo is now managing a 3D Warehouse Collection called Nanaimo Current Models, containing Pauline’s models and any other good models of Nanaimo the collection managers run across.  If you’re interested in having your high-quality photorealistic geocoded model added to this collection, let the City know in the Nanaimo 3D Models Google Group.

These tools are a great way to convey planning information to the public.  In the future, hopefully the City will also be able to publish historical models of buildings that have been replaced and conceptual models of new developments for public review.

-J

P.S. Cheers to the Sketchup folks too; it didn’t take them very long at all to evaluate the initial set of models and push them into Google Earth.

P.P.S. Like all articles on this site, this represents my personal opinion and viewpoint, not that of my employer.

http://www.civicinfo.bc.ca/161.asp?jobpostingid=8372

This is an entry-level position, but with experience and good performance it can grow into regular and senior-level jobs. At these levels, the incumbent develops specializations in one or more of the development, database, or spatial areas. Read the entire posting for details, and check out the full job description on the City’s website once it is posted.

It’s up to you to decide whether working with me is a benefit… or not ;)

-J

Some interesting entries have been nominated. In particular, FDO and Fusion (both open source applications) are competing alongside other prominent applications in the Innovator Award category.

Full disclosure: My work on earth.nanaimo.ca (built with MapGuide Open Source technology) is nominated for the Public Enterprise category. Please only vote for it if you think it’s the most deserving solution in this category.

-J

Basic improvements include:

• automatic pull from our FDM Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD… a popular acronym) database, removing requirement for dispatchers to manually update this list
• publication of the incidents in multiple formats (GeoRSS, HTML… KML planned for an intermediate update)
• integration with Google Maps

This is what the query interface for incidents looks like:

This is the embedded Google Map (using the GGeoXML class to hit the GeoRSS feed) showing incidents for the selected day:

This is the basic statistics interface allowing users to see incident activity for a date range (which also has a similar Google Map embedded):

And this is what the GeoRSS feed looks like in Google Maps

And now for the technical stuff…

Chris has put together a fairly strong process for extracting and displaying this information publicly, consisting of several components:

• A monthly FME process that reads the current 9-1-1 streets shape file and places it into a normalized database structure (one-to-many between lines and coordinates). This allows easy formatting of coordinates for different output formats (GeoRSS, KML, etc) in native ASP.Net.
• A SQL Server Integration Services job that pulls initial incident data from our CAD database, as well as updated information from the RMS (records management system), generalizes it to block ranges to reduce privacy concerns, and writes it our publicly accessible webserver.
• An ASP.Net web application that transforms an XML serialized data set into GeoRSS (and eventually other formats) using XSLT.
• An ASP.Net web application that provides the rudimentary user interface, including the incident query mechanism, incident statistics, and Google Maps integration.

The current applications are accessed via IFRAMEs because although our standard for web apps on our main site has changed from ASP to ASP.Net, our web site migration is still under way. Once the web site is redeveloped, these will be standard non-encapsulated web apps.

This is definitely just a starting point for us; the framework that has been used for this application was designed so that we can add other data sources that make sense for GeoRSS syndication, such as recent business licenses, building permits, etc. This aligns with our website redevelopment, where we are using RSS/Atom as an alternate access mechanism wherever possible.

As an initial project, there are certainly limitations with this implementation. For instance, we haven’t defined an API for pulling down specific categories or date ranges from the RSS feed. Also, because the GGeoMap class doesn’t expose properties of specific features, we were unable to link the incident rows with the map (pan and pop-up). There are third-party interfaces to Google Maps (GeoXML, EGeoXML) that work around this, and of course the option of just creating the lines ourselves, but we were trying to keep coding and dependencies to a minimum. There is a ticket in the Google Maps API issue tracker for this, so hopefully it will be addressed eventually…

Ideally we’d be using a spatially-enable database (such as PostGIS) as the underlying data store for this application, but we don’t have PostGIS in place on our public webserver yet.

-J