GTI Jumpstarting Better Field Data Collection
By Tom Coolidge and Tom DeWitte
It’s always a joy for us to see the amazing work our customers are doing with ArcGIS for the betterment of their organizations and those they serve. It’s even sweeter when a customer is in a position where they can freely share that work with others so they, too, can put it to work. That’s the case with GTI and the work they have been doing to create Survey123 templates for the natural gas industry.
For those of you who may not know, GTI is a leading non-profit research, development, and training organization addressing global energy and environmental challenges. Among their hundreds of initiatives across the energy value chain, they develop and implement tools, methodologies, and technologies for maintaining a safe and intelligent natural gas infrastructure. The GIS department within GTI has been working to encourage electronic field data collection with GIS to optimize the entire data management process for utility and pipeline operations, significantly reducing the cost and complexity of capturing real-time high-accuracy information.
With these common goals in supporting the natural gas industry, Esri and GTI collaborate to help natural gas utilities be successful in their efforts to implement and leverage geospatial solutions to address industry business challenges. More specifically, recently, we have been looking at ways to make it easier for the natural gas industry to use the robust geospatial tools that are available today.
Through this collaboration, GTI now is publishing Survey123 form templates that they have created. The first survey form to be published is Indoor Gas Meter Set Risk Assessment. This form assigns a risk score to indoor meter set evaluations in real time based on user input.
The capabilities embedded in this first template are impressive. It includes examples for:
-Using HTML tags to set text color
-Performing calculations based on the user’s response to the questions.
-Hidden fields
-Context driven logic
-pick lists
You can review this survey123 template yourself following these steps:
- Open Survey123 Connect
If you do not already have Survey123 Connect, you can download it from this location:
https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/survey123/resources
2. Click on the “New Survey” option
3. Within the New Survey dialogue, select the “Community” radio button
4. Scroll through the list of posted surveys to find the survey named: GTI/OTD – Indoor Gas Meter Set Risk Assessment
5. Select GTI survey and click on the Create Survey button
6. Review the newly created survey
The indoor meter set risk assessment is the first of many surveys to be posted by the GIS team at GTI. These survey templates will help natural gas organizations of all sizes to deploy this powerful mobile data collection application. Take a look at these surveys and see if they can help your organization improve its data collection activities.
PLEASE NOTE: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent Esri’s position, strategies, or opinions