Concepts Demonstrated: GIS, Technical Support

Project Summary: NVision provides ongoing onsite GIS analysis, GIS data creation, data maintenance, and map production onsite for FEMA and other federal agencies including the Army Corp of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the National Guard in support of every aspect of Hurricane Katrina rescue, recovery, and rebuilding in Mississippi under FEMA’s Region IV Planning Division.

Concepts Demonstrated: GIS, Web Application Development, Database Support & Administration

Project Summary: NVision provided onsite Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, ArcSDE, database design, development, maintenance, and troubleshooting support for FEMA. Also provided all software application development within the FEMA Region IV Planning Division which included the Call Center application used to respond support calls from hurricane victims living in FEMA trailers by FEMA contractors and FEMA managers. NVision also created custom software to automatically migrate Microsoft Access field databases to a centralized Oracle database available to FEMA managers region-wide.

Concepts Demonstrated: GIS,Technical Support, Data Maintenance

Project Summary: NVision provided on-site GIS services, equipment, and software at the Hancock County, Mississippi Emergency Operations Center. GIS services included the creation of a complete GIS Mapping Center including two plotters, a color laser printer, two inkjet printers, a high-speed copier, a large format scanner, map laminator, 10 GIS workstations, an ArcSDE geodatabase server, an ArcIMS Map server, and cell phone repeaters. GIS services included GIS analysis, GIS data creation, data acquisition, data maintenance, map production including large format maps as well as mapbooks and digital maps, map and data restoration through scanning and re-digitizing, FIRM map georeferencing, Pictometry analysis for debris pile scouting and measurement, and general IT support for the EOC. NVision project managers served as coordinators for volunteers from the GIS Corps as well as liasons to ESRI’s Disaster Response team. NVision provided GIS services directly to FEMA and other federal agencies including the Army Corp of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the National Guard in support of every aspect of Hurricane Katrina rescue, recovery, and rebuilding in the heart of Katrina’s eye path.

Concepts Demonstrated: GIS, Technical Support

Project Summary: NVision provided on-site support at ESRI headquarters in Redlands, CA for three months. NVision provided priority phone and e-mail technical support for ESRI’s ArcSDE geodatabase software to federal and state government customers. In addition to providing direct customer support NVision supported ESRI technical support staff with customer issues in offices around the world. Technical support included troubleshooting any and all issues on every platform which ArcSDE runs to solve customer problems, data model and table structure consultation, and providing verified bug reports and suggested solutions to the ArcSDE software development team.

Concepts Demonstrated: GIS, Web Development

Project Summary: NVision Solutions Inc. worked with the Naval Oceanographic Warfighting Support Center at the NASA Stennis Space Center to create the Geospatial Information Service Portal (GISP). This system integrated the digital map and data creation, validation, documentation, and dissemination of U.S. Navy mapping products into a single system capable of distributing data and metadata including security information over the military Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. GISP allows analysts to load data into an enterprise geospatial database and then tag this information with security information as well as create and automatically validate Federal Geospatial Data Committee (FGDC) metadata. Data can be searched, viewed, and if the user has clearance downloaded on secure military networks through the GISP portal site. GISP also integrates with legacy military search engines and map-based websites.

Concepts Demonstrated: Emergency Decision Support Systems (Homeland Security), Internet Mapping, Enterprise Geo-Databases, Hydrology Modelling

Project Summary: St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, with a grant from NASA, contracted NVision to build a Web-based Decision Support System including a dynamic flood inundation model based on NVision's Emergency Decision Support Architecture.

The flood model coupled with real-time weather sensors will enhance parish officials' ability to make quick decisions in times of crisis to coordinate disaster management efforts, make estimations about damage, and protect parish citizens. Parish disaster management personnel can log into the Web site from anywhere and visualize predicted flood inundation on top of 6-inch color aerial photography of St. Tammany at different inundation levels as well as get vital statistics about the flooded area including population, property values, and contact information for local coordinators. NVision turned these reports into triggers for the Parish "first call" system which will automatically telephone residents in the affected areas and alert them of the possible inundation with a recorded message.

NVision serves the decision support system through an ESRI ArcIMS Java website running on top of an ArcSDE / SQL Server 2000 database. NVision aggregated all available geographic data into this geo-database which is also available to parish departments through the Web using any ArcGIS or other SDE compatible ESRI software. All parish officials have access to the same versioned geographic data to streamline data sharing throughout the St. Tammany.

The NVision team completed Phase 1 of this project and continues to improve the geo-database and has nearly finished porting the flood model to a custom Java application that will provide improved flood inundation modelling. For real-time data sensors NVision integrated USGS Stream Guages as a point layer on the map. This layer is updated every 15 minutes. NVision also integrated an experimental NEXRAD Doppler Radar layer updated every five minutes to show the latest precipitation over the parish. In the next phase of the project NVision will integrate approximately 25 low-cost wireless stream guages throughout the parish to model stream conditions as completely and accurately as possible. This stream data will be integrated into the decision support system.

NVision CIO Craig Harvey initially envisioned this model which NVision prototyped in the "RiverWatch" demonstration product below.

Emergency Decision Support System PDF Brochure (368 k)

Emergency Decision Support System PowerPoint Presentation (299 k)

Concepts Demonstrated: Linux Clustering (Grid Computing)

Project Summary: World Winds Inc. hired NVision to configure their custom Linux cluster. NVision set up the eight-node, Beowulf, MPI cluster using the Portland Group Compiler to do both coarse and fine grained parallel processing giving World Winds 32 GHz of raw computing power with eight gigabytes of shared memory. World Winds will use the cluster to do advanced weather modelling.