The Fulcrum Focus

Using Data Shares for Map Embeds in Fulcrum
Data Shares make it easy to publicly share data collected in your Fulcrum apps in formats like CSV, KML and GeoJSON. We just launched a new feature that makes sharing your data even easier – Map Embeds.

Last month, I attended the 8th annual CFGIS Workshop in Orlando with fellow Spatial Networks employees Andie Dodd and Bryan McBride. The event brought together Central Florida’s GIS enthusiasts from the public and private sectors, as well as many national vendors. At the conference, I observed that local governments are making a huge push to publish their GIS data on publicly available web maps. I have a few reflections on this topic and can suggest a tool to help create a great end product.

When we first started to build Fulcrum’s SpatialVideo features, we had to do a lot of testing. In the beginning, testing revolved around holding a device and capturing video while sitting in a passenger seat, or precariously setting a phone on the dashboard. Not only does this require the time of two people to collect video, but can also result in unstable, shaky video data. Since one person driving and filming is not only dangerous, but can get you a ticket, we started testing out different mount devices to see what worked best.

In the past few weeks my colleagues have showcased examples of how applications can be built on top of Fulcrum, utilizing our open source libraries and the Fulcrum API:

Fulcrum provides a powerful API for taking advantage of programmatic access to many of Fulcrum’s features. With the API, you can do things like create records and photos, update apps and choice lists, and delete webhooks. The RESTful API is easy to interface with, but there are a few language-specific wrappers that make things even easier.

Before joining the Spatial Networks team, I spent five years working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as a Geospatial Coordinator. My days were spent collecting data pertaining to specific disasters, analyzing it, and publishing informative maps which were then used in decision-making by senior leadership at FEMA and in state governments.

So the hotly anticipated Apple Watch is now a reality. Many thought Apple might do something drastically different, but they didn’t — their device looks surprisingly similar to prior art in the space from Google and Samsung. It’s a watch with a few productivity functions beyond timekeeping, has almost none of its own onboard sensors (save the HealthKit and activity tracking sensors), and not-too-impressive battery life. The physical constraints of the wristband form factor don’t provide space for making significant innovation beyond the territory of their competitors at this point. If they made it super slim, it’d have less battery life and no sensors. The face can’t be too big, but needs to be big enough to interact with buttons and text. To do anything cool you need radios and sensors, which make it bigger. Marco Arment covers these engineering and design tradeoffs in his excellent write up.

Jason and I were in Portland, OR last week for the annual FOSS4G conference. FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) is the largest global gathering of developers, users, decision-makers and observers focused on open source geospatial software.

One of the keystones of the Fulcrum platform is extensibility. Rather than locking users into a monolithic ecosystem of proprietary formats and fixed workflows, we’ve built Fulcrum to be easily accessible and customizable. From cross-platform support to open data formats, our goal is to make Fulcrum the go-to field data collection platform for professional organizations as well as individual projects.

Many Fulcrum users are working indoors, conducting facility inspections of inside spaces. Within large facilities there may be multiple floors and hundreds of rooms to visit to inspect equipment, perform quality checks of plumbing and electrical, or observe the quality of build-outs for future repairs. Even though these types of work happen indoors without access to accurate GPS signals, you can still use Fulcrum’s mapping capabilities to geolocate your data on a reference background.

We recently received an inquiry from our friends at Code For America who suggested designing an app for documenting trailhead information which would be compatible with their new Open Trail System Specification. The OpenTrails initiative seeks to “provide a uniform exchange format for publishing machine readable data on the extent, attributes, and use of our nation’s trail systems”. The goal is to help facilitate the open exchange and use of trail data between various stakeholders, including data stewards, trail managers, government agencies, and public users.

The latest updates to the Fulcrum web interface include some exciting new features and enhancements. The most prominent change is the new “App Dashboard” page. We’ve streamlined the main Fulcrum landing page, moving the administrative tools to the new App Dashboard page and making the core tools more prominent. Clicking on the app name now takes you to the App Dashboard page, where you can access the administrative tools along with a high level snapshot of activity within that particular app.

The onboard GPS hardware built into consumer smartphones has improved immensely over the years, along with the software technology to help augment positional accuracy automatically using other sources of data, like cellular and Wi-Fi signals. Users of Fulcrum frequently ask about our experiences with the built-in GPS antennae on iPhones, iPads, and the myriad of Android devices available to find out what sorts of positional accuracy and precision they can expect to get using different flavors of hardware. There’s also a growing universe of 3rd-party aftermarket devices that can be paired to smartphones or tablets using Bluetooth, allowing users to override the onboard device readings or add new capabilities not otherwise available out of the box.

Fulcrum data shares provide shareable URL’s for taking your dynamic field data via standard formats, including CSV, KML, and GeoJSON. This ability to stream your data, in real time, to a variety of clients opens up countless integration opportunities. Any application that can consume a web accessible file in one of the supported formats should now be compatible with your custom Fulcrum app.

Hyperlink Fields
Another new feature with the latest release of Fulcrum is the introduction of a new field type to add to your apps: Hyperlink fields. Hyperlinks allows you to store URLs to any desired path right alongside a record within your app, in order to link to content outside of Fulcrum data. Links can be used in all sorts of different ways to do interesting things during your data collection projects, like linking to web addresses, or content paths on your own server. Using Hyperlink fields, viewing a record containing a URL allows your field user to tap and open those URLs associated with each piece of data. In this post, I’ll outline some of the basic setup information of how to use Hyperlinks, and show an example of exactly what’s possible.

We’ve been hard at work the last few months creating an amazing new capability for field survey in Fulcrum using video capture, on both Android and iOS platforms, and now we’re announcing a new feature!

API Date Filters
Our API is a core piece of the service that allows organizations to extend Fulcrum to suit their particular needs. To keep increasing the value and power of the API, we make it a priority to listen to suggestions from our users that make it easier for them to interact with their data.

With the recent release of Fulcrum data shares, we’ve opened up new capability to consume and view data collected in the field in systems outside of Fulcrum, including GIS tools, custom scripts, spreadsheets, or web maps, without the need to manually export content from your account.

Many of Fulcrum’s users are in the field collecting data which later needs to be shared with various stakeholders, like clients, government agencies, or management team members. Today we’re releasing a feature that makes this process even easier. Data Shares allow you to generate simple URLs for downloading or accessing data within your Fulcrum Apps that you can publish or share.

This week is the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, one of the largest geographic sciences organizations in the world, with members from the academic and scientific communities, business, and government from over 60 countries. AAG’s annual meeting has been held every year since the Association’s inception in 1904, providing a platform for members to discuss the latest in geographic and cartographic research and GIScience.

Patrick and I just returned from a week in Tunisia at the GCT 2014 Conference, meeting with regional GIS organizations and companies working with mapping all over continental Africa. We met with dozens of people focused on many different aspects of geospatial technology – from aerial imagery and remote sensing to surveying and incident reporting from the field. The industries of focus ran the gamut with heavy interest in electric, gas, water utilities, rail and transportation, law enforcement, tax assessment, and more.

This is a guest post from Mitchell Sipus, interdisciplinary Community Planner specialized in designing creative solutions for the world’s most complex environments.

We just released an update to add several new tools for visualizing data in the Fulcrum web interface. Layers, which includes what was previously referred to as maps, will greatly enhance the data review experience through the Fulcrum web app. We also added a few tools to make finding locations in the web app easier and faster.

As a follow-up to Last week’s announcement regarding the addition of layers functionality, today I want to walk through using offline map layers in the Fulcrum web app. Utilizing offline map layers in the web app allows the user to review data in the same manner as the data was collected.

In the latest release of QGIS (2.2 “Valmiera”), the free and open source desktop GIS software, there’s a great new feature to support one-to-many data relationships. Since we recently launched parent-child & repeatable records in Fulcrum, we wanted to write up a quick overview on how you can use QGIS with data collected in Fulcrum to do visualization and analysis for free on the desktop. Read on to learn how to create data relationships and do more using your data in a GIS.

One of the best places to go for exploring the data collection possibilities of Fulcrum is our App Gallery, which includes many pre-built app templates for different types of field surveys, across dozens of industry sectors. Today I’ll be discussing three of our latest featured additions to the gallery catalog to demonstrate the flexibility of Fulcrum to meet a wide variety of requirements: traffic sign inventory, erosion control monitoring, and construction safety.

The latest Fulcrum mobile updates include some great new features, which should help to make your fieldwork more productive. In addition to the new time fields, checklist fields, and improved validation, we’ve added a few new record actions and editing options that are worth taking a few moments to review.

With the release of our management dashboard design improvements a couple weeks ago, we also introduced a new panel for administrators monitoring activity in their Fulcrum organization, to be able to view field updates as they happens. The Activity Feed panel, visible on the right side of the main dashboard, shows a chronological view of activity going on with your users.

Languages in Fulcrum
Fulcrum has a growing user base throughout Central and South America, Africa, and Europe, and supporting users worldwide is important to providing the best data collection tool for diverse environments. In the latest update to Fulcrum for Android and iOS mobile platforms, we’ve added translations into three new languages: Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

New app-building tools
We just released an upgrade to add some nice new tools for building apps in Fulcrum. When creating digital surveys for field inspections or checklists, the data types you use to create your data collection apps are key to data integrity, as well as speed and efficiency while working in the field. This new update adds two new field types to the App Designer: a time selector field and a checklist field, for quick “Yes/No” style questions. We’ve also added a much-requested ability to do range validation on numeric field types (e.g. “value should be between 1 and 10”).

You may have heard more about stormwater recently than you’ve ever heard about it before. Stormwater has been in the news quite a bit – particularly in the region of the Chesapeake Bay – because of tighter government regulations, new fees, and because stormwater is one of the largest sources of pollution in the Bay and its contributing waterways. Stormwater runoff picks up oils, sediment, and litter from impervious surfaces (such as parking lots) every time it rains. If this pollution isn’t captured by stormwater management infrastructure (and much of it is not) it makes its way into the Chesapeake Bay.

I was recently invited to give a guest lecture presentation on Mobile Data Collection for a ‘GIS In the Sciences’ course at Rensellaer Polytechnic University in Troy, NY. This course introduces upperclassmen from various majors to the fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems. My presentation was about 5 weeks into the course, so the students already had a pretty good grasp of the basics and were becoming familiar with using QGIS to display, edit, and analyze their geospatial data.

Before joining the Spatial Networks team, I spent the last six and a half years working as a GIS Analyst/Developer for a full service engineering firm on projects spanning the globe. One of the cool things about working in the Technology Solutions group for a multidisciplinary engineering firm is that you get to be involved in a wide variety of projects across many different disciplines. Engineers are involved in everything, from transportation projects to environmental impact assessments, utility network design to water and wastewater system modeling. In my experience, this level of variety in a GIS job is rare.

With the recent release of parent-child data relationships in apps using Fulcrum’s new Repeatable sections, even further possibilities have opened up for creating more advanced survey forms. An additional feature we added here is the ability to store location data for each child item independent of the parent record. The use cases for this are many.

CARTO is a fantastic service that provides intuitive, web-based tools for GIS and mapping. Like Fulcrum, CARTO harnesses the power of PostGIS for spatial data processing. Where Fulcrum excels at mobile data collection and management, CARTO excels at dynamic data visualization and mapping. We’ve just published a CARTO webhooks guide on how you can use Fulcrum webhooks for collecting and updating your data in the field and displaying it in realtime using CARTO.

At last – interactive offline maps in Fulcrum
Offline maps in Fulcrum just got a whole lot more interactive! While the new support for one-to-many relationships has been getting a lot of attention, the latest mobile builds also quietly included a slick enhancement that allows for feature interaction within offline maps.

With the addition of repeatable fields, which enable the collection of parent-child relational data, we have also added ways for you to access and visualize both data types through the Fulcrum data management website. The regular data view is still available and will allow you to view and modify records as before, however, we have enhanced the data view for apps using repeatable fields to make the child record data accessible as well. In addition, through the record editor on the Fulcrum dashboard, you are able to view, collect, and modify child records. Finally, because child records can have unique locations themselves, independent of the parent, map views are also available for child records.

As part of yesterday’s update to support complex relationships between data types in Fulcrum, we also added another new powerful capability that makes offline fieldwork even easier for teams.

Today we’re announcing some major new features in Fulcrum. First, we’ve added a new repeatable field type that enables parent-child (i.e. one-to-many) items within records. A long-requested feature from many of our users, this new capability will enable you to create much more advanced data collection surveys and inspection forms, produce higher-quality data & geodatabases, and streamline the collection process to save time and reduce error from the field. Along with the addition of repeatable data types, we’ve improved the data exporter to support several additional formats, created a brand new advanced data importer, and released major updates to the Android and iOS apps. Together, these new features add significant power to the Fulcrum platform for doing field work. Here’s an overview of each new addition.

We on the Fulcrum team work hard to make collecting your data a breeze. And we’re always thinking of ways to make Fulcrum more valuable and powerful for you, our customers. To that end, we are pleased to announce the release of webhooks for Fulcrum.

Keep track of changes with full version history
In addition to yesterday’s announced data management improvements with the launch of full-text data searching and filtering of content, we’ve also included another powerful capability for managing field service work: data versioning.

One of the most powerful features available in Fulcrum for managing field data collection operations is our administrative data dashboard on the web, where administrators or managers can login, create or edit their apps for deployment, and also manage data that’s inbound from the field.

Over the last few months, we’ve been working hard to bring Fulcrum for iOS to the next level, making data collection even faster and more powerful. The app has been rebuilt from the ground up with tons of features and improvements all around, as well as a whole new refreshed look and feel. Announcing Fulcrum 2.0!

Previously on the blog, we’ve discussed the concept of field reports and groundtruthing on top of raster data (like satellite imagery), and the simplicity of accomplishing this in Fulcrum. Using Fulcrum’s native support for MBTiles-based map tile packs, any raster can be turned into a portable tilecache you can load onto mobile devices in Fulcrum, allowing you to annotate on top of the map using custom-designed forms.

Earlier this year, Applied Geographics (AppGeo) and Spatial Focus embarked on a 3 month pilot phase of an address reference system project on St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas – the three main islands of the U.S. Virgin Island Territory – for the Office of Lieutenant Governor Gregory R. Francis. 1500 of roughly 120,000 addresses covering the three islands were assigned during the pilot phase. The field crew was faced with having to develop easy procedures that would support a small local team who had limited experience with GIS technology and even more limited access to communication technology. This part of the story took place during the latter part of the pilot project (late May-June 2013), in the second and third pilot study areas in Cruz Bay, St. John and Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. The Fulcrum app was incorporated into the field data collection process making it possible to develop, deploy, implement and maintain mobile applications quickly and easily.

Showing image metadata
Back in July, we added a small but very useful detail to how photos are displayed in the Fulcrum web app; all EXIF data can be shown while viewing a photo. This geotagging information includes device make/model, software, photo dimensions, date, altitude, direction, latitude/longitude, and even distance to record.

To recap, a couple of weeks ago we attended the Central Florida GIS Workshop in Orlando, a regional event bringing together GIS staff from many Florida city and county agencies, as well as those from consultancies and mapping companies. There was a great lineup of talks and presentations highlighting many local Florida projects.

Modern Civil Engineering should include technology! An increasingly rapidly changing digital world demands a furious pace of innovation in our engineering environment. SMEC, or Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation, is one of the leading engineering and development consultancies in the world. Providing multidisciplinary consulting services in engineering, project management, environmental science and development activities, SMEC has been engaged in assignments throughout the world for over 40 years.

While Fulcrum photo fields make attaching pictures to records a ‘snap’, the flexibility of having a single field for multiple photos can be somewhat challenging when dealing with exports. In this short blog post I will describe a few techniques I have found for managing this one-to-many relationship challenge.

One of the coolest features in Fulcrum is building offline map layers for mobile mapping. Access to a local map tile cache untethers you from the need for network connectivity to get reference map data when in the field. Using the map design software TileMill, along with some geo data or imagery, you can make your own custom map layers to load onto mobile devices for your Fulcrum field teams. In this post, I’ll walk through using some free and open resources to get your own satellite or aerial photo data, build some offline map tilesets, and load them onto your mobile devices for field use.

We just completed a substantial upgrade to the Fulcrum web platform, making our hosted service even better for our ever-growing global user base. Fulcrum data is now replicated in real time to multiple datacenters in separate geographic regions, increasing redundancy and making data even more safe and secure. As your teams are syncing up data from the field with customized data collection apps, all data is now streamed to several database servers simultaneously. We know how expensive field operations can be, so this level of data safety adds tremendous value to make sure you get the most out of your workforce. Mirrored cloud servers, along with complete data backups guarantee the safety of your valuable collected data.