Overview
The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT)—as part of their planning, construction and maintenance process—must carefully track HAZMAT, cultural resource, water quality, and noise features, as well as wetland remediation sites, to ensure compliance with the appropriate state and federal regulations. These features are most efficiently geo-located in the field and include assets such as wells, underground storage tanks, plumes, water quality sampling locations, noise sensitive receptors, roadways, building rows, ground zones, spill sites and sinkholes. Samping locations may also be geo-located for biological surveys, and stream assessments.
The challenge for VDOT was to arm their field workers with an easy-to-use mobile application that would assist them in inventorying and inspecting over 30 features spread across a number of groups at VDOT. A goal was to use lessons learned from legacy projects that were built around workflows that included manual processing steps to get field data into the enterprise GIS. A final goal was to place GIS data collection into the hands of non-GIS users who would receive minimal training.
Timmons Group built a custom mobile application that enables VDOT’s field-based workforce to be more productive and collect more accurate and timely spatial and business data to support VDOT’s mission. The mobile application solution also includes workflows to support field data capture by VDOT staff and will leverage direct synchronization to their enterprise GIS and Oracle databases. This solution employs the latest technologies from both Microsoft and Esri including SQL Server Compact, the Microsoft Synch Framework and Esri’s ArcGIS Mobile 10 product. The solution overcame the legacy challenge of trying to put mobile GIS into the hands of non-GIS users by eliminating the need to process field data to get it into the enterprise GIS, and by creating a highly usable, custom mobile experience for non-technical users.
