Call to Order – 10:30am

Welcome and Introductions

Ex-Officio Members

MSDIS – Thomas Vought – p

NSGIC Liaison – Tony Spicci – p

OA ITSD GIS – Tracy Schloss – p

USGS – David Nail – p

State Members

DNR – Jerry Prewett – P

Economic Development – Colin Duewell – p

MDC – Tim Bixler – P

MOARNG – Wiley Howell – p

MoDOT – Joe Carter – p

OA Planning – Jori Simpson – p

SEMA – Brandon Wolfe – P

Cooperating Members

BCFPD – Jason Warzinik – p

Boone County – Nathan Mattox – p

City of Columbia – Dan Rose – p

City of Jefferson – Buster Schrage – e/p

City of KC, Water – Stacey Roberts – p

City of Lee’s Summit – Steve Marsh – p

Cole County – Melissa Johnson – p

Mid-MO RPC – Jennifer Bowden – p

MO 911 Board – Brian Maydwell – p

MU Extension/CARES – Chris Barnett – p

Northwest MO State University – Ming-Chih Hung – e

Sanborn – Brad Arshat – e

Southeast MO State University – Indi Braden – p

Surdex – Tim Donze – p

US ACE St. Louis – Michael Gawedzinski – p

Washington University – Mollie Webb – p

Wilson & Co. – Derek Smith – p

Woolpert – Kent Park – p

Other Attendees

Census Bureau – Craig Best – p

ESRI – Chase Fisher – p

ESRI – Joe Eckmann – p

MSPS – Jon Cole – p

St. Louis Board of Elections – Rob Ryan – p

St. Louis Board of Elections – Bill Hartnet – p

State Tax Commission – Rosella Schad – p

Columbia Public Schools – Richard Perkins – p

 

Motion made and seconded to approve minutes from the December meeting. Motion passes unanimously.

Administration

OGI Report – Imagery contract moving through signature process. Still working on classifications. Not many other states have GIS job classifications. They use IT classifications which makes it hard to figure out what other GIS professionals at states are getting paid. Arnold Williams and Debbie Bridewell are both retiring at the end of the month. Trying to figure out work load while so short staffed.

MSDIS – January 2021

 

Updated Data

– MO 2021 Hospitals

– MO 2021 Licensed Pharmacies

– MO 2021 Rural Health Clinics

– MO 2021 Long Term Care Facilities

– MO 2021 Adult Daycare

– MO 2021 Ambulatory Surgical Centers

– MO 2021 Dialysis Centers

– MO 2021 Sales Tax Jurisdiction Boundaries

 

MSDIS General News

MSDIS was happy to attend the second part of the virtual 2020/2021 MAGIC Clearinghouse summit in January. Clearinghouse managers from all MAGIC states were treated to an inside look at ArcGIS Hub* and some of the more advanced features available for data organization and discovery. In addition to the fact that it is always nice to get together with our sister clearinghouse sites, this was a valuable opportunity to get a better feel for the ArcGIS Online/ArcGIS Hub ecosystem.

 

For those unfamiliar with the changing ArcGIS Hub environment, the system currently known as Hub was previously referred to as Open Data. MSDIS had already adopted this distribution service before the name change, which is why what some people will refer to as our “Hub Site” is what we refer to as the MSDIS Open Data Page.

 

With the new year comes a new semester, and MSDIS is happy to welcome Jefferson Daubitz, Abby Hunt, and Harry Le back to the MSDIS internship program. We are also excited to welcome newcomer Carson Stone to Team MSDIS. As with previous semesters, these students will help build new story map applications, review current data organization, spot typos, and generally do their best to keep us out of trouble.

 

Finally, some recipients of this report will have noticed a considerable decrease in traffic on the MSDIS Map Server over the past few months. While some fluctuations in traffic are natural, especially around the holidays, we felt that the reduction in hits was sufficiently large enough to merit investigation. Additionally, the fact that a downturn was only evident on the Map Server and not on the Image Server or the Download Server indicated that something was clearly amiss.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the change to any one factor, something that immediately stood out to us while reviewing server logs from earlier in 2020 revealed a pattern that we did not expect – one of the largest single sources of traffic on the Map Server was still attached to the 2019 MoDOT Routes and Emergency Reference Markers datasets, right up until we turned those services off in mid-November 2020. Also of note, the user in-question was based in Florida and not Missouri. In fact, we appear to have inadvertently cut off several out-of-state users by disabling the older MoDOT data. While serving our Missouri users will always be our first priority, we do sincerely regret that our normal course of business has had a detrimental effect on some of our out-of-state users.

 

This reveals two issues with the current MSDIS architecture, one of which we can control, and one of which we cannot. In the column of things we cannot control, while we try very hard to announce changes to data services before we make them (such as removing older MoDOT services once we have newer versions), our ability to communicate those plans are limited to 1) people who subscribe to our Twitter account and 2) people who receive these monthly reports. Out-of-state users who have happened to come across our services in web searches who do not also take an interest in MSDIS operations will almost always be at the mercy of these service swaps .

 

In the category of things we can control, however, is the fact that, with proper renaming, we might not have to swap any services at all. Currently, all of the MSDIS services follow the same STATE_YEAR_DATASET naming convention that we use for data downloads. This was the naming convention that was put into place years ago and, until now, there has been little call to change it (though, in the interest of full disclosure, the idea has been pitched to us). As state GIS clearinghouses become more accessible to more GIS users and we receive more data more frequently, though, it may be time to reconsider this strategy. If we were to rename all of our existing services with a simple STATE_DATASET schema, we would (in theory) eliminate the need to delete old services when a new year rolls around. For example, the current hospitals map service, currently named “MO_2021_Hospitals” could be renamed “MO_Hospitals” and that service could be kept active indefinitely regardless of the year the data were produced. Information about the currentness of the data (year and monthly update status) could be kept in the service description (which it already is).

We raise this issue in this report because this is not a small change. Mechanically, it is pretty easy, but it would be time consuming and it would break any connections that our users already have to MSDIS services since we would be replacing all of our existing services with the new naming convention. Quite simply, this is not a plan that we can execute without first hearing the thoughts of our Missouri users. In that spirit, we invite our users to share their thoughts on this issue. We will give all feedback full and fair consideration and we will not act or make a final decision without first making an announcement on the results of this request for opinions.

 

MSDIS Downtime

No outages were reported during January 2021 however we twice noticed during our own inspections of the site that some map and imagery services were behaving strangely. On 11 Jan and 26 Jan, some services were available and active, but nothing would draw, as if the service had somehow been disassociated from the data sources. Upon closer inspection, there were no obvious problems found on either the MSDIS Map or Imagery servers, so we took the normal step of restarting the machines. In both cases, all services were restored to expected functionality immediately after. Both of these incidents took place outside of normal business hours, so we have no reason to believe that they impacted MSDIS users.

Treasurer’s Report – No expenses. $22,849.95

Membership Report – Total: 37, Good Standing: 32, Vacant: 5, Quorum: 19

By Laws Report – Nothing to report

Presentation

Chase Fisher with ESRI gave a presentation on Working with drones and Imagery using Site Scan for ArcGIS. Drones are being used in many ways. Drone2Map is a premier offering. Site Scan is new to digitize a site. Starts by creating flight plan, then flying, images go to cloud where its processed then can be analyzed in browser. Information can be downloaded to use in other products. Flight app only works with Ipad OS. The flight plan management is a big difference between Site Scan and Drone2Map.

Committee Reports

Data Development – Imagery contract being signed “soon”. Hoping to fly leaf-off next year at 1 foot at least half of the state. Looking for partners. $700k price range estimated. Possible cost share. March 12^th meeting to gage state department interest.

Education – Been sitting in on ArcPro cartography course. That has been interesting.

Workshops – No Report

Conference – Decision to go virtual was made. Single tack 2-day conference.

Liaison Reports

MAGIC – Planning in-person conference. Will announce after May meeting. April 2022 at Branson Landing.

NSGIC – Online conference coming up. There was GIS mention in the executive order about climate and environmental justice.

Cooperating Agency Report

USGS – Lidar status is moving along well.

Roundtable Discussion – St. Louis county dissolved their GIS department.

Adjournment – 12:06pm