2025 Ohio GIS Conference Notes
2025 Ohio GIS Conference Notes
September 15, 2025
Breakout Session 1: Applying Project Management Principles to Geospatial Projects and Programs
Speaker: Ashley Hitt, Cultivate Geospatial Solutions
Project Knowledge Areas
- Integration
- Scope
- Schedule
- Cost
- Quality
- Resource
- Technology and People
- Communications
- “Top project managers are 90% focused on communication.”
- Risk
- Procurement
- Stakeholder
Project v. Program
Project
- Has specific objectives
- Elaborate plans progressively
- Scope defined by objectives
Temporary and Unique
Projects
- Long-term
- High-level plans
- Value Driven
- Adaptive
Coordinated between projects
Product Management
- Product lifecycle
- Create, Maintain, Evolve, Retire
Project and Product Lifecycle
Product Lifecycle
- Concept
- Delivery
- Growth
- Maturation
- Retirement
Management Approaches
Waterfall
Task 1 -> Task 2 -> Task 3
- Gantt Charts
- Hierarchical task and activities
Agile
Plan -> Iterate -> Feedback -> Repeat
- Product backlog - What are we waiting on
- Sprint planning, short term planning, think in days
- Sprint Backlog - What work didn’t get done last time
- The Sprint
- Stand ups
- Demos, Feedback, Reviews
User Stories
A short description of a feature or ability
- Tasks to sprints based on the needed task for each user story
Which is right?
Hybrid and other combinations are options.
Specific start and end dates are constraints
What causes failure?
- Inaccurate Requirements
- Inaccurate vision or goals - What’s the why?
- Inaccurate constraints
Triangle of Tradeoffs
Scope -> Budget -> Schedule
Risk Management
What could potentially happen? What is the response?
Risk Identification
- Status - Active, Dormant, Retired
- Type - Threat or Opportunity
- Category - Organizational, Technical, External, Management
Risk Statement
If - Then
Risk Rating
- Probability v. Critically
Response Response
- Strategies and Action
Risk Owner
Risk Register
- Spreadsheet including the above
Change Management
- Policies
- Formal change control and approval
- Project management approach
- Tracking changes
Trainings and Certs
Project Management Institute
Breakout Session 2: Everywhere, Everywhen: The Geography of Existence
Todd Tuckey, Heartland GIS
Core Principles
- Geography is the science of when and where
- Space and time is inseperable
Moving away from the Big Bang
- Geography is tied to movement,
- Movement away from big bang
- 380 million years after light began
- Misunderstanding about space
Geography is atomic
- Everything exists in grids
- Understanding these grids is the base of geography
The science of where
- Location
- Place
- Scale
- Movement, Can not be left out
Geography is not fixed
- Often taught as fixed.
- Over emphasize static
Space/Time
Speed is relative
- We are moving 1675 km/h around the earths surface
- “We are creating a biography of time, history and space”
Physical Geography
- the material where
- Measuring and documenting the physical world
Human Geography
- The experiential where
- Sense of place
- The material of our memory
- Culture and place
- an attachment to geography
Geographic Traditions
- Difference between representation of space
Landscapes are in flux
- Maps freeze time
- Illusions of permanence
- How do manage the idea of movement?
- We know rivers change, forests expand and contract
Geography is temporal
- Place = Space and Time
- Space-time fabric
Hosted Feature Layer Views
Kelly Wright
HFL 101
- Feature Class in AGO
- includes spatial and non-spatial data
Benifits
- Persistent later configurations
- No server (no versioning!)
- Centralized data source for multiple uses
What it does?
- Filter, Area of interest
- Multiple views, persistent between data and views
- No data duplication
- Views can included ability to limit access, users, etc.
Why?
- custom perspectives on data
- access
- Control who sees what
- Edit capabilities are different
- No need to share parent feature layer
- streamlines maintainability
Control Access
- Need to know basis
- Use groups
- Leverage group roles
- Usable for offline sync
Enforce Data Governance
- Enable editor tracking, Who created or edited a record - a little dicey
- Apply ownership access and editor
- Use backups
- Use HFL views
Hosted Feature Layer Views
Creating and Managing
- Creating a view: filter, fields, and permissions
- Assign the access controls: viewers, editors, admins
- Filter based on uses: spatial and attribute filters
- No need for delete ability
- Change views as data changes
Steps to publish
- a whole bunch of ESRI jargon
- Many warnings about how the software isn’t compatible with itself
- Publish on AGO
Publish in AGO
- From Feature layer overview
- Click create layer view
- Select joined view layer
- Weird GUI problems. Not sure didn’t follow
- All of this can be fixed with Postgis and some SQL queries
Managing in AGO
- Authoritative and Deletion protection in Settings
- Public Data?
- Allow export of data for exports from experience builder
Joined view layers
- Once created, you can not edit underlying feature layer schema or domain