The Fulcrum Focus

Back in December, I wrote a blog on Managing Data Exports With SQLite. That article covers some basic relational database concepts, with particular regard to managing complex Fulcrum data exports. While we continue to receive support inquiries regarding best practices for managing exported field data, I thought I would continue this topic and provide some additional options for slicing and dicing your data with GDAL/OGR.

Skitch for photos
Many Fulcrum users have a desire to annotate photos, make circles, add text notes, or simply draw on existing photos. We are occasionally asked what sorts of tools are out there for annotation (or if that feature is available). Annotating photos often helps to identify something within a photo so there is no mistake in what is being identified (for example in safety audits, environmental surveys, damage inspections, etc…). In our opinion, the Skitch app beats everything on the market, hands down. It was recently purchased by Evernote, so it is safe to say that it is going to be around for a long time.

Maptime is an exciting new initiative with the mission of “opening the doors of cartographic possibility to anyone interested, by creating a time and space for collaborative learning, exploration, and map creation using mapping tools and technologies”.

Many local government agencies maintain awesome datasets of aerial photography, and publish that imagery under flexible or public domain license to enable easy use for many different types of applications. Fulcrum supports the MBTiles format for offline map packages, so it’s useful to know how to take the up-to-date, hi-res imagery available in GeoTIFFs for your project area, and build maps to use in the field. In this post I’ll walk through downloading and converting some aerial photos, then loading them into TileMill to create offline maps, including a video walkthrough on how to create them.

I’ll be out in Chicago this week for the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting. The AAG 2015 Meeting is one of the largest gatherings of Geographers in the world and brings together close to 8000 geographers from 60 countries. The program will cover a large selection of topics and looks to offer many interesting talks.

Recently, we’ve been expanding and redesigning our App Gallery search functionality, making it much easier to locate relevant apps for specific industries. In order to make new users aware of how Fulcrum could be used, we populate the Fulcrum App Gallery with sample apps. By doing this, we have found that almost all new users start with one or a few of these apps to get started, and on occasion, some improve them for their own use. The use cases of Fulcrum continue to surprise and delight us.

CRM systems abound on the internet these days, giving sales teams ample ways to log sales meetings, leads, customer interaction, and track business opportunities. Giving sales teams and management the visibility into operations and sales activity can bring incredible value to your organization if done well. However, a CRM tool is only as valuable as the data you put into your system. The more rapidly you have raw data and feedback from your field sales people, the faster you can make decisions to influence the customer or prospect interaction process.

The latest Fulcrum release includes some subtle enhancements for programmatically interacting with the mobile apps. We’ve introduced the fulcrumapp:// URL scheme for opening the app to create a new record or edit an existing record, with the option to pass in certain attributes via parameters.

Collecting rich media along with your survey forms is one of Fulcrum’s hallmark capabilities, allowing you to add detail to your collection workflow by using pictures and SpatialVideo.

Classification sets in Fulcrum let you create predefined hierarchies and schemas for classifying selection choice data into a standard format. This makes selecting a value from a long list of items incredibly efficient in the field. Classification sets are searchable and let you quickly ‘drill down’ to your intended value.

For mapping-based projects using Fulcrum as a data collection platform, GPS positional accuracy is paramount for many applications. These days there are quite a few devices available on the market to augment your consumer-grade hardware, an excellent option for cost savings that doesn’t require you to drop $5,000 on a piece of custom hardware (with crappy built-in software). You can buy specialty sub-$1000 receivers to get better GPS accuracy, but pair them up with purpose built location based apps like Fulcrum to get your work done.

A few weeks back we announced that we built integration tools on top of Zapier, to enable Fulcrum to be wired up with over 100 web services. This week the integration is now public for all Zapier users. Using Zapier, when you collect data in the field using Fulcrum, that data can trigger events to perform actions like sending emails, SMS alerts, and tons more.

Historic preservation
Historic preservation is a big deal in our cities these days. There’s an entire movement focused on the rediscovery and re-use of our urban cores. With any city of significant age, a key step to making the most out of our existing infrastructure is understanding, preserving, and in many cases reusing our historic sites in new and interesting ways.

This time last year, I was a FEMA employee working in the field of GIS. I was pondering at that time how to build a mobile GIS app that worked on an iPad or iPhone and could be deployed into the field with the Public Assistance teams (their current process involves paper and GPS units, and a lot of data entry done in hotel rooms). This mobile app would need to be extremely easy to use, be able to feed data into a database, and the data be viewable on a live map. This was a challenging proposition, but one that excited me.

The Fulcrum Development Team just returned from San Francisco following another great FOSS4G Conference. This was my second FOSS4G Conference, and my first time attending the North America event. As with FOSS4G Portland, the best thing about attending a conference like this is being surrounded by all the creative energy of folks excited about doing cool stuff!

The importance of time
 

The Fulcrum Development Team will be out in full force at the FOSS4G-NA 2015 Conference in San Francisco next week! The conference has lined up some great keynote talks as well as an impressive session schedule. We are hoping to schedule an impromptu Birds of a Feather (BoF) session for anyone interested in mobile field data collection and we are always more than happy to chat Fulcrum at any time. I will be Tweeting from the @fulcrumapp account, so be sure to join us and monitor the #foss4gna hashtag to keep up with everything else.

Accessing child record history
And, just in case you want to know why being able to see child record history from parent root level history:

A little over a year ago I put together a CARTO Webhooks guide and wrote a short blog post on CARTO highlighting how to use our recently released webhook push notifications to push Fulcrum record updates to CARTO tables. This post caught the attention of our friends at CARTO, which got some conversations going and launched our close working relationship.

SpatialVideo captured in Fulcrum often contains a wealth of “mappable” information. Coleman previously blogged about extracting video features for mapping in OpenStreetMap and after recently rediscovering geojson.io, I wanted see if I could come up with a simple way of quickly mapping features discovered visually in geojson.io.

We have a lot of Fulcrum customers that work in the fields of engineering and architecture, and when designing and constructing facilities of any size, it is imperative to be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act design standards. In researching ADA compliance, I used the New England ADA Center’s ADA Checklist for Existing Facilities form to build a custom ADA Fulcrum app. The New England ADA Center is one of ten members of the ADA National Network, and publishes the checklists. I found their checklists to be extremely comprehensive. Because Fulcrum is so flexible, it took me about 30 minutes to build most of the Priority 1 checklist. You can see how easy it is to use in the video below.

Back in November, Coleman blogged about using Fulcrum’s SpatialVideo as a tool for collecting OpenStreetMap features. Since releasing SpatialVideo functionality, we have captured quite a bit of video coverage, particularly around Spatial Networks headquarters in the Tampa Bay area.

NOTE: This feature has changed since 2015 and this blog post is out of date.
The Fulcrum platform is built on top of several excellent open source components, including Leaflet and Mapbox.js, and we support the open GeoJSON format as the de facto data standard for web mapping. Your Fulcrum data is always available in GeoJSON format as an export or via data shares, and the web map allows you to view GeoJSON files as additional map overlays.

Our Fulcrum team is continuously trying to push the limits of mobile collection technology and build what we learn into new capabilities to help our customers. I am always on the lookout for commercial or consumer products that our customers could use in tandem with Fulcrum. Recently while shopping at Home Depot, I came across the new Ryobi’s Phone Works devices which function on both iPhones and Android phones (compatibility list).

We’re working on building some integration tools using Zapier, a great service that allows Fulcrum data to be integrated or sent to other services based on specific triggers. Zapier has existing tools to integrate with services like Salesforce, Dropbox, Google Drive, Basecamp, and many more – or to do simple actions like send emails, SMS messages, or push notifications.

Recently, we at Fulcrum came across the AccessLand initiative to provide open data and APIs for “our nation’s parks, forests, monuments, campsites, cabins, and tours.”

Fulcrum’s calculation fields enable some powerful collection capabilities. There can be many ways to configure and set them up, so this post provides some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your data collection workflow.

Fulcrum’s SpatialVideo collection capability can be a valuable addition to data collection workflows, including mapping of rights-of-way, assets, pipelines, electric lines, environmental monitoring, and more.

I recently demonstrated to a Fulcrum customer how to georeference a floor plan of a mall for indoor use when conducting inspections of malls around the country. This same process can be used with Fulcrum for creating small offline maps. I’ve chosen not to use QGIS or ArcMap, but instead am using inexpensive or free software that anyone can learn to use in less than an hour.

Along with being able to share data collection surveys with field staff to collect data points, Fulcrum also has a powerful import tool for loading existing data into your account to send out to field, either for reference or for field workers to update. We put together a short how-to demo video showing how this can be done, using a shapefile to load some GIS data for editing.

Fulcrum customers worldwide are using the platform to collect a huge variety of data in the field, and the dynamic, adaptable nature of Fulcrum allows the flexibility to build the exact tool for the job. Today we’re introducing a new feature to extend this even further: Calculated Fields.

Getting the most out of ArcGIS™ with Fulcrum
Fulcrum already has a great import tool. Whether you’ve got shapefiles or CSV’s we’ve got you covered. We thought it would be nice to import data directly from an ArcGIS™ Server instance so we built fulcrum-ags-import.

While recently writing some software in JavaScript, I noticed a pattern. I would create an object, and then call init() on it. The instance needed some stuff done before I could use it.

Our latest updates include some great form validation enhancements for even better quality control over your data. These enhancements include supporting custom validation patterns for text fields by defining a regular expression (regex), as well as the ability to define min/max limits for certain field types.

Customizing Fulcrum photo options on Android
Our latest release of Fulcrum for Android (2.10.0), is adding photo quality options to the settings. This option can be used to scale images taken at the device’s full resolution down to a smaller size. Working with smaller images can significantly improve a number of things (storage usage on the device and server, synchronization times) without having a negative impact on your data.

2014 was an exciting year for Spatial Networks and Team Fulcrum! Looking back at our accomplishments over the past twelve months, it’s clear that Fulcrum has really matured into a stable, feature-rich platform, which is fast becoming the go-to solution for structured geographic data collection. We have a dedicated and diverse customer base who are using Fulcrum all across the globe, in ways we never could have imagined and 2015 is looking to be another exciting year!

During December 11 and 12, Bryan and I joined CARTO in New York City for their CartoDB14 partner event.

Every day we find new customers using Fulcrum for wildly different applications for field data collection. Nothing is more exciting as an engineer than to see something you’ve built being used to solve real challenges, all over the world. However, as a fast-moving, agile software team faced with an enormous variety of use cases—sometimes with directly opposite requirements—you can’t build everything (nor should you).

The Fulcrum platform has grown tremendously over the past few years, and while we continue to add new features and integrations, the primary task of Fulcrum remains- to enable users to quickly and easily build structured data collection solutions. Our goal is to remove the technical hurdles typically associated with developing a robust mobile data collection solution, so that anyone can collect accurate, timely data, which ultimately provides the foundation for sound decision making.

Identify records at a glance from list or map view
In our recent update last week, in which we announced support for barcode/QR code scanning, we also made some additional modifications to make it easier to identify records at a glance when looking at the list or map views on Fulcrum for iOS and Android.

Like many companies who employ off-site team members, Spatial Networks brings everyone together a few times a year for a week of handshakes, hugs, good food, and better beer. Amazingly, some code usually gets shipped as well. Our most recent visit was punctuated by a long awaited change of venue as we moved into our new, custom-designed space, leaving behind an office that never quite felt like home. These visits are important for a variety of reasons, but here are a few that stand out to me each time we have a meeting of the remotes. Here’s a recap of what got done:

Fulcrum update – In-App Barcode and QR Code Scanning
Fulcrum is already flush with data types that you can build into your own custom data collection apps for field surveying. Many Fulcrum users have deployed Fulcrum for asset inventory and evaluation projects, with service technicians or inspectors tracking asset locations and conducting quality inspections.

Last month we sent out a customer satisfaction survey to Fulcrum account owners in order to better understand what our customers enjoy about Fulcrum, what they dislike, and how we can make their experience better. Suffice it to say, we learned a lot.

Adam Rose, PE, GISP, CFM has several letters after his name, but is nonetheless fairly lazy: he enjoys creating and automating software and hardware to make the lives easier for environmental engineers and others in the water profession. In his spare time he is a product manager at XP Solutions, a software company.

At its core, Fulcrum is a business productivity platform focused on making field operations more productive by providing tools for speeding up the data capture process, and enhancing data quality across the board.

OpenStreetMap editing is typically centered around tracing, meaning digitizing features on top of satellite imagery to extract things like roads, buildings, landuse areas, coastlines, and other visible features. The data made available by providers like Bing for OSM tracing is fantastic for creating the basic foundational elements.

Update for 2023:
We are thrilled to announce that Fulcrum has entered into a definitive Commercial Provider agreement with Esri™ to leverage their technology stack. This partnership brings together the leading solution for field inspections and data collection with the top geographic information systems (GIS) platform, which is used by clients in virtually every industry that requires location-related data, mapping, and analysis.

The latest updates to the Fulcrum Android and iOS mobile apps include some great new functionality that we are excited to announce. While every update includes subtle improvements, behind-the-scenes performance enhancements, and bug fixes, this release includes some great new features for truly customizing your mobile apps.

Fulcrum was designed from the ground up to support full offline usability, but we are proud to extend support of custom online tile servers to our mobile clients as well. The latest updates to the Fulcrum Android and iOS mobile apps now list all of your Tile XYZ layers in the mobile layer selector, right along with your custom offline layers.

In addition to the recently released Map Embed feature, we’ve just open sourced a simple template for building responsive web applications, powered by Fulcrum data shares. This template wraps the Bootstrap framework and Leaflet mapping library into a fullscreen, mobile-friendly map application with a responsive navbar, searchable & sortable sidebar, and modal info windows. You can configure the app Title and provide your own logo or icon, in addition to defining which fields you want to expose and whether the markers should be clustered or not.

A couple of weeks ago, Bryan and I were out in Flagstaff, Arizona for the annual meeting of OFWIM, the Organization of Fish and Wildlife Information Managers. Over the last several months, we’ve been doing a webinar series for OFWIM’s membership; a group which consists of technical staff, researchers, and GIS analysts working at federal, state, and local levels on issues related to fish and wildlife mapping and data management.