Latest Contributions by JonHall

Jennifer, thanks for the detailed reply! RE:" the external MSAG had not yet been brought up to date to recognize the new street suffixes. Are you referring to the spelled-out pre and post directionals ("NORTH" replacing "N") or street types ("ROAD" replacing "RD")? This is the biggest issue in the NENA-STA-006.1 standard that I forsee impacting GIS data professionals, causing backward compatibility issues (your #4). Does NENA really envision MSAG coordinators making all those changes in the legacy MSAG during lengthy NG911 transition periods? The NENA data structures workgroup will be trying to answer that question and more, in an upcoming info document. Your input and experiences are very valuable. Thanks! -Jon ... View more

Aha! Sullivan County. Wish I'd seen your 2014 post,  I had some personal involvement with Sullivan County 911 data in the eary 2000s. NYS is much further along in NG911 transition now. Best regards, Jennifer  ... View more

Joe, you are correct, in general. Anyone who works extensively with GIS data for E911, like you and I, appreciate many details and nuances that are not apparent to 90% of GIS professionals who work primarily in other disciplines  I've developed numerous QA checks in PYTHON scripts and VB.NET ArcGIS AddIn tools for attribute issues that impact geocoding. West Safety has a "MAPSAG" product, and GeoComm has a "GIS Hub" cloud-based, hosted product, that have built-in the QA audits necessary for NG911. Others have made similar toolsets available at no charge, like the Kansas NG911 project. Use builtin ArcGIS Topology rules for centerlines that must not have dangles, must intersect, and carefully determine which "errors" are necessary acceptable "exceptions" to rules, and which require edits to correct. Writing the code, using Model Builder, PYTHON, or VB.NET to extract, translate, and load existing GIS data into the NENA NG911 GIS schema is beyond the capabilities of the average GIS professional. An experienced GIS programmer could easily do it, and will discover the many shortcomings that may exist in the source data. You have done this type of work using PYTHON, but the average joe has not. Just "map the field names" is rarely one to one. That is where the average GIS professional working in other disciplines needs some guidance. What do you do if your data does NOT have an equivalent attribute? Or your values domain doesnt translate to NENA values domain? Resolving these issues is labor intensive, the avg GIS tech doesnt have hundreds of hours available to drop everything and work on it, and its very expensive to pay a vendor to do it for you.  There are some VERY good vendors, thank goodness, but eventually they will give you a TODO list that only the local GIS and 911 authorities can resolve. My advice is to start chipping away at it now,  before you are in the jam Jennifer found herself in 4 years ago. The NENA schema is used to provision the backend GIS database for web servers that validate addresses (Location Information Server, Location Validation Function services) and replace E911 Selective Routers for the NG911 Emergency Call Routing Function (ECRF). These web servers need interoperability between ESINETs in 50 states and a dozen different vendors who code their proprietary versions of the ECRF/LVF. Different vendors may provision data from source files that arent NENA standards compliant, and might store data in their webserver that aren't NENA standards compliant, but must have the interoperability capability to export data to NENA standards when requested by other web services on the interstate 911 information highway, aka ESINET. This is very difficult to code, if the server database, (and provisioning source data) are in a schema that is significantly different than the NENA GIS standards.  And the NENA GIS standards are continuously evolving, so it is a moving target. I'm on a NENA standards workgroup, and last weeks conference call included a member comment that she didn't appreciate NENA changing the draft standard 3 times while she was working on a statewide provisioning plan. There is finally a stable, published standard, and the next v2 revision will carefully consider the impact on everyone using v1. NENA plans to write an information doc of guidelines for NG911 GIS Transition, using lessons learned by early adopters (like Jennifer?). There has also been discussion of writing a short "NG911 GIS Data for Dummies" info document distilling the basic concepts in the data model standard doc, for folks like Joe who don't have time to read the full standard. Thanks for your insights, Joe. If you renew your NENA membership, your perspective would be valuable on a standards development workgroups. If not, take comfort that many who have walked in your shoes are contributing to the standards. Take away: if you aren't a fulltime time 911 GIS professional, but supporting NG911 GIS data maintenance will be a part of your job, start educating yourself on the subject. MSAG-GIS street name synchronization is one of the first steps. Google NENA 71-501, a 2009 info doc that will be refreshed next year. The process is a basic necessity, long before you consider any GIS data schema conversion. Its complicated, if the GIS analyst who provides mapping updates to a 911 center is not already familiar with the MSAG coordinator. Some local authority must determine if the GIS is wrong and needs edits to match the MSAG spelling, or the MSAG needs edits to match GIS. Dont forget to check street signs and USPS spellings, and request updates by USPS and/or the street sign authorities to get everything in sync. ... View more

Jennifer, did you eventually answer your questions? -Jon ... View more

Jason, thanks, I use that at home, it is a great deal, but that hundred bucks is not in the budget for her.  She found out the college provides her with an authorization code and the installer for ArcGIS Desktop 10.4, so problem solved. I think the answer to my question is "NO", ESRI doesn't want you trying or buying the tried&true ArcGIS Desktop, forcing new users into Pro. I understand ESRI's business case, but the hardware requirements of ArcGIS Pro are a show-stopper for users in the shrinking middle class. She's already replacing her Chromebook with a newer laptop, just to run ArcGIS, and its hard to find great "back to school" deals on laptops with 8GB-16GB RAM.  ... View more

Peter- Thanks! I had started this effort on my own, but hadn't finished.  -Jon Hall Communications 911 GIS Specialist Little Rock Police Department - Communications ... View more

Kansas is doing great things! However, the NENA standard is WGS84, not state plane. Best regards ... View more

Montana's schema is a start, it contains the "required" layers, but not all the "strongly recommended" and "recommended" layers. The spatial reference needs to be reset to WGS84 (EPSG4326) on the first layer I checked. No other coordinate system is acceptable. ... View more

NENA published the data model last month, 6/16/2018.  NENA-STA-006.1-2018 https://www.nena.org/resource/resmgr/standards/nena-sta-006_ng9-1-1_gis_dat.pdf  I've read this thread before, and revisited today because it's time to create the schema. I found an empty FGDB schema at Montana's website: ftp://ftp.geoinfo.msl.mt.gov/Data/NonSpatial/NG911/NENA_NG911_GIS_Data_Model.zip  ... View more

The "missing" records are versioned edits in the "A" tables - running COMPRESS on ArcSDE moves those to the "base" tables that you are viewing in SQL Server. You should also see "extra" records in the base table, for any records that have been deleted, which are in the "D" table. The mv view queries those "missing" records into the view - that's what is special about mv views. Using SSMS, look-up the name of your table in the SDE_Table_Registry table, and get it's registration_id. Then, for example, if the registration_id is 164, using SSMS, take a look at the A164 table for "missing" records, and D164 for "extra" records that haven't been deleted yet from the base table. There is a wealth of info on these subjects in the Help content for ArcGIS - the forums are a quick-fix, but you ought to study the documentation more thoroughly, to get a better understanding of how versioned editing in ArcSDE works in the underlying DBMS. ... View more

Kyung- I don't know what could be wrong. If you re-post the latest version of your code, maybe something will hit me. I tried this in VBA a couple years ago and gave up, so I share your frustration. Just got it working in ArcGIS 10, .NET, VS2010. 2 more things you could try: 1. set the .Application property before anything else: [INDENT]Set pTableWindow.Application = Application Set pTableWindow.FeatureLayer = pFeatureLayer [/INDENT] 2. verify that you have the TableProperty for the correct Featurelayer, check it's FieldOrder before, and again after you reset it:   [INDENT] ' Re-order the fields Debug.Print("TableProperty FeatureLayer: " & pTableProperty.FeatureLayer.Name) Debug.Print("TableProperty Original FieldOrder: " & pTableProperty.FieldOrder) pTableProperty.FieldOrder = "OBJECT_ID, UFI, MF, NT, UNI, LAT, LONG" Debug.Print("TableProperty Revised FieldOrder: " & pTableProperty.FieldOrder) [/INDENT] The newer interfaces, ITableWindow2 and ITableWindow3, take an iLayer instead if iFeatureLayer; I think those were added in 9.3 and 10.0. ... View more

Kyung- That 'freeze fields' sample only works with ONE table, if you have more than one Table open in ArcMap, you need to step thru he enum of TableProperties until you find the one for the shapefile name you are trying to change, for example "Streets" : pEnumTableProperties.Reset Set pTableProperty = pEnumTableProperties.Next Do While Not pTableProperty Is Nothing 'Test if it is a FeatureLayer or Standalonetable pLayer = pTableProperty.Layer If Not pLayer Is Nothing Then    If UCase(pLayer.Name) = UCase("Streets") Then Exit Do 'Found the right pTableProperty! Else    pStandaloneTable = pTableProperty.StandaloneTable    If UCase(pStandaloneTable.Name) = UCase("Streets") Then Exit Do 'Found the right pTableProperty! End If    pTableProperty = pEnumTableProperties.Next            Loop ... View more

Kyung- When you say "it didn't work", is your code finishing with no errors, and when you open the table, the field order is unchanged? Do you have any errorhandling in your VBA code to catch errors??? For example: Public Sub ChangeFieldOrder() On Error GoTo Errorhandler <your code here>     Exit Sub    'exit before errorhandler Errorhandler:             MsgBox "An error occurred in ChangeFieldOrder:" & Err.Description, vbCritical, "ChangeFieldOrder" End Sub ... View more