Our environment and the infrastructure that lies within is ever changing making it a challenge to keep GIS data current and veracious. Decision makers rely on up-to-date input of data to make evaluations that could have profound impacts on people, communities, businesses, etc. Fulcrum provides a collection and editing tool for data collection for field technicians up the chain of command to administrators behind the desk. Whether your interest is in adding information to your database or just verifying what already exists, Fulcrum is the solution.
I was able to access a parcel shapefile from my county’s GIS website. This shapefile contains standard information such as ownership, legal descriptions, tax districts, etc. While much of this data is constantly updated by the tax collectors office there still is the need to perform in-situ data collection for recording code violations and county infrastructure maintenance on many property parcels.
I started by using QGIS, an open source GIS desktop application, to generate centroids from the polygon parcels to create points and saved them as a .csv to upload into Fulcrum. I only needed to import the “Address” and “Parcel ID” columns from the parcel data into Fulcrum. Using the “Parcel ID” as a unique identifier, I made this field read only when modifying the app. Doing this allowed me to relate and join my new data to the existing parcel data. Once the “Parcel ID” and address fields were imported, I built an additional section with field types for recording city code violations using the Fulcrum app designer.
Using Fulcrum as tool to collect information about code violations allows a direct line of communication of data from the field to the office in order to keep my community aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Whether you’re a small organization, government, or large institution Fulcrum can be your data collection solution.