April 11, 2024
MGISAC Meeting Minutes
Call to Order – 10:03am

Attendees

Ex-Officio Members

MSDIS – Thomas Vought – p
OA-ITSD/NSGIC – Tracy Schloss – p
USGS – David Nail – p

State Members

MDA – Jacque Walters – p
DNR – Zackary Becker – p
Economic Development – Amelia AuBuchon – p
MDC – Tim Bixler – p
MOARNG – Wiley Howell – p
MoDOT – Colin Duewell – pp

Cooperating Members

All State Consultants – Katilin Belk – p
BCFPD – Jason Warzinik – p
Boone county – Matt Smith – p
City of Columbia – Calvin Patterson – p
City of Jefferson – Buster Schrage – p
Cole County – Melissa Johnson – pp
Mid-MO RPC – Jennifer Bowden – p
MO 911 Board – Brian Maydwell – p
MU Extension/CARES – Chris Barnett – p
Northwest Missouri State – Ming-Chih Hung – p
Sanborn – Brad Arshat – p
Surdex – Steve Kasten – p
GISCI – Tony Spicci – p
US ACE St. Louis – Jennifer Backer – p
USDA-NRCS – Katie Philbrick – p
Washington University – Mollie Webb – p
Wilson & Co – Derek Smith – p
City of Springfield – Nathan Huggins – p
City of Branson – Curtis Copeland – p

Other Attendees
Jack King – Surdex
Misty Perry
Ryan Rhee (BCFPD)
Amanda Bybee – Springfield
Matt Hesser
Dan R.
Navjot Kaur
Joe Eckmann – ESRI
Rick Staudinger
Zachary Dlouhy
Kayla Flamm – MO Botanical
Travis Tompson
Tara Vansell
Dorris Scott

Meeting Minutes – Motion made and seconded to approve meeting minutes from the last meeting. Motion passed unanimously.

Administration

OGI Report – Waiting to hear about GIS decision item still. New ESRI price/product list. Updated once a quarter. Can raise cost once a year contractually. Looking to use ESRI geocoder at enterprise level. This helps with public interaction in one portal. Street Map Premium. This would become source for NAD Currently many geocode agents are returning different locations.

MSDIS Report – April Report

Updated Data
MO MoDOT Roads Routes
MO MoDOT Roads Arcs
MO MoDOT Emergency Reference Markers
MO MoDOT Rest Areas
MO MoDOT Commuter Lots

MSDIS General News
While the MoDOT datasets listed above are not new to the clearinghouse by any stretch of the imagination, their recent inclusion is an important step. This will be the first complete batch of MoDOT datasets that have been deployed to the MSDIS AGOL account entirely as updates to existing services rather than as brand-new hosted feature datasets. You might remember a post from several months ago where I described the update option as a possible means to better track usage of a dataset over time since it would not reset whenever a new version of the data were uploaded and the old version was deleted. We’ve been testing this mechanic with the MoDOT updates over the last few cycles of updates and this is the first instance where all five datasets were added to our AGOL account as updates rather than as brand new hosted features.
In addition to updates to MoDOT data, MSDIS also received a hard drive full of LiDAR data from USDA-NRCS, courtesy of Katie Philbrick. On review, some of the projects on the drive are completely new to MSDIS and will be added to the LiDAR directory of the MSDIS Imagery server. Several of the projects are already present on MSDIS servers, though, but they appear to use a different organization method. In the coming weeks we will take time to compare what is on the drive with what we already have so we can better understand what assets exist, how they have been delivered, and what we need to do to make them available.

This is going to take a lot of time.
LiDAR data are, and have pretty much always been, the source of the most significant organizational difficulty that MSDIS regularly faces. That’s not a complaint. We love getting new LiDAR data and we love making those data available to you. But, between older projects that are out of date but have precious little documentation, newer projects that require massive amounts of storage, different naming conventions for any given project, and the inherent LAS/DEM duality of the data, there is no easy way to work with these files.

So, what’s the plan?

As we race towards the end of the Spring 2024 semester (not sure how that happened so quickly), we will have more time to work on MSDIS things. As our MSDIS time ramps back up, LiDAR is the first major concern on our list. Our first step will be to examine the data that were just delivered and decide on the best course of action to 1) decide what to keep and where, 2) get services set up and streaming, and 3) get the data over to WashU to establish downloads. You can safely expect that stage will take several weeks (because the “we” in this case is still just one person, two dogs, and two cats).

Once we get the new stuff sorted out, we will turn our attention to the older projects. Don’t worry, we are not going to (intentionally) purge any of the old data, but we do need to figure out the best option for presenting those data in light of the fact that many of them have been replaced by newer, better acquisitions. We have no intention or desire to delete old data, but we do need to be very mindful of what data are presented to the outside world for as services vs downloads. People want access to these data, and we certainly don’t blame them, but we cannot be expected to maintain services for every LiDAR project ever handed to MSDIS, especially when many of those projects are older than the students we are just about done teaching (that may not be entirely true, but it definitely doesn’t feel too far off). We need to figure out how old is too old for a LiDAR project to deserve a service. Right now, after the LiDAR service rebuild of last year, we only maintain nine services, with the intent being that they represent the fewest number of services required to get as close to a complete state as possible. Of those nine services, one is an older Boone county service that has (as far as we can tell) been replaced by a newer collection. That’s an easy scenario. The older Boone county service gets removed and the newer one lives on. But what about

MSDIS Downtime

No downtime was reported in March 2024.
Image Server Statistics

Since the replacement of the MSDIS Image Server, we have struggled to find a software to provide a comprehensive breakdown of server and service usage. We had hoped that the statistics pulled directly from ArcGIS Server Manager would be a suitable substitute, but the very bare-bones records were significantly less than what we wanted.

Moving forward, we will no longer publish these numbers in our monthly reports. We will remain on the lookout for a reliable option for parsing the server usage in the hope that we can publish these numbers again. The raw server logs are still being saved if anyone requires them. Should anyone need a rough estimate of usage for certain specific services, we are more than happy to run those numbers via Server Manager.

Treasurer’s Report – MAGIC Sponsor $500. Dreamhost %155.88. MU Fee $31.77. Remaining $38,166.61. Anticipated NSGIC Costs coming. A little more pricey than originally budgeted due to location and duties, but still within discretionary allowance. Mid-cycle budget review coming up.

Membership Report – 35 members. 2 vacancies. (Boone and Lee’s Summit). SEMA and Boone Fire have had a change in representation. Renewals are coming up in May. 16 memberships being renewed this round.

By-Laws Report – No report

Presentation – Amelia AuBuchon – Office of Broadband Development – Challenge process opened March 25th. Goal is to improve the Broadband Map. Want to catch unserved or underserved locations that aren’t going to be served funds. April 23th it will close. New challenge map has some additional functionalities since the last one. Some challenge times can be rebutted by service providers.

NOTE: Nominations for elected positions open until May

Committee Reports

Data Development – Imagery contract renewal (3 years) is in OAs hands right now. Waiting to hear back. 2024 flight completed. QC going on now. SEMO flight has been collected and being QC’d. USGS is monitoring. Upcoming is Addressing Schema adoption to point to one agreed standard. Metadata a possible point of standard interest in future.

911 – QA/QC coming up in the next couple months. Will need volunteers. Aggregation/validation portal released. Data Mark was selected. Can submit GIS data and get feedback. A lot of information coming out soon. Board meeting Monday. Expecting 13 more counties. $1 million. Question about portal. It will be a web address access once officially released.

Legislative – SB1039 and HB2191 for MGISAC. No action on HB in 2nd reading. SB has been through 3 readings and has been referred to house tech committee. If passed it will be law without HB passing. Other bills haven’t really moved. Fiscal notes being looked at. HB1415, the drone bill, is being watched closely. Fed offices already have some anti-China tech policies for a while. Public hearing was April 3rd.

Outreach – More website progress. Changes made to the Data Development page and Education page. X account was shut down.

Education – Story map on MGISAC page. It gives information on the committee and meetings as well as education resources and opportunities. Images made with AI in Microsoft Co-Pilot.

Conference – Updated on RFP. Be thinking about themes.

Liaison Reports

MAGIC – Conference is next week. 278 registered. Venue is full. Attendance is up. Conference app being worked on. Workshops and grant programs will start up after conference. Booth is going.

NSGIC – Katilin attended Mid-year meeting. GIO academy covered grants and resources. Slide decks are available. Monday covered 3DEP and setup for Tuesday hill visit. A variety of things were discussed from updating coordinate systems for collection. One meeting at the hill had a review of how things are advancing in the states. Wednesday’s big takeaway was on NG911. Addressing and Transportation breakout on Thursday. State Caucus meeting talked a lot on license and pricing changes.

Agency Reports

USGS – Mo southern project was looking for lidar holes to get everything to 1 meter. These projects are complicated because some is based on watershed or county, or other boundaries. 7 county project with Mark Twain NF, NE MO project, and SE 12 counties project are collected. Some are on MSDIS or will be soon.

Open Discussion

The logo may change a bit if legislation is passed. We would go from MO GIS Advisory Council to MO Geospatial Advisory Council.

Adjourned – 12:03pm