It feels like it’s been a long winter but spring is finally in the air. This means more sunshine, longer days and, for many, the start of the field surveying season. After a successful trial in 2010, we are looking forward to working with SEPA to implement a GeoField solution for their River Catchment Walk and Farm Assessment teams, who will be using Handheld Algiz 7 ruggedised tablet PCs to electronically capture the results of their field survey work. GeoField’s SEPA solution will provide direct delivery to the enterprise GIS and document management systems and far greater efficiency over the existing paper-based process.

Springtime may seem like the perfect environment for outdoor work. But for many mobile workers, the job continues no matter what the weather. This is especially true in the utilities and emergency service sectors. Recently, we’ve enjoyed interesting new GeoField projects with Wales & West Utilities, ScottishPower, Scottish Water and Bristol Water, meeting the changing demands placed on utility field engineers. We are also looking forward to working with Derbyshire Fire and Rescue helping to ensure that their field planning and risk assessment are second to none.

We’re out and about ourselves in these spring months – some of you may have visited our new stand at the BAPCO annual conference in early April, while others can catch up with our latest news and product demonstrations at the Esri UK Annual Conference in London on May 16th-17th. We look forward to seeing you out on the road.

Best wishes

Paul Reid | Managing Director

Working in association with the Health and Safety Laboratory, Sigma Seven have developed a GeoField incident reporting tool

‘Our work with GeoField is helping us unlock the potential of our geospatial data. With Sigma Seven, we are building mobile applications which will allow us to better understand workplace environments, reduce risk, increase the accuracy and speed of our field reporting and allow our experts to work more efficiently away from the lab.’ - William Holmes of HSL

The Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL) is an agency of the Health and Safety Executive and Britain’s leading industrial health and safety research facility. They provide an independent, expert source of science and technology solutions to industry, public and private sector customers globally.

Working with HSL’s Geographical Information Systems Team, Sigma Seven have developed a version of GeoField to improve site incident reporting. Previously, reports were based on written transcripts from field exercise books coupled with photography and measurements from other instruments. These disparate data were difficult to correlate, manage and analyse, especially the positioning and location information.

The solution is the HSL Incident Reporting Tool. Utilising Sigma Seven’s flexible feature palette, HSL have been able to create a set of data recording tools based upon their own in-house symbology. This is combined with forms, data fields and terminology commonly used in field reporting.

The Incident Reporting Tool has also unlocked the power of HSL’s geospatial datasets, with OS MasterMap®, address, and population data providing even more detailed context to a field incident reporter.

By deploying on sophisticated ultra-mobile PCs, HSL have been able to seamlessly geocode and record photographs against their reports. Coupled with powerful external GPS receivers, the positional accuracy of the collected data will be improved even further.

Sigma Seven’s selection as the solution provider was based on our track record of project and solution delivery and our experience in handling secure data connections. Data security is a key factor for HSL and their experts were satisfied that Sigma Seven could deliver a secure solution.

HSL are now working with Sigma Seven to perfect the solution and widen its use. The coming twelve months look to be an exciting and expansive time for field working at HSL.

In the last edition of Field Views we announced that we were working with Wales & West Utilities, the gas distribution business for Wales and the South West of England, to mobilise data and workflow to 1000 field engineers.

The contract was signed the week before Christmas, and we are pleased to announce that their GeoField solution was delivered into User Acceptance testing in March. The roll-out will start from the end of April and is expected to be completed by the end of July.

‘There is a real excitement within the business at using GeoField,’ commented Nick Hancock, WWU Project Manager, ‘and this will provide a great platform for us moving forward.’

Did you know the word slogan is originally Scottish? It comes from the Gaelic sluagh-ghairm meaning ‘battle cry’. We weren’t really looking for a slogan in our reader competition last issue but we were interested in hearing what people thought of GeoField.

We enjoyed reading the many witty and creative entries, some of which would make very good battle cries for Sigma Seven. So thank you to all who entered. The winner was Oisin Kelly from Landscape Planning Group for whom GeoField means ‘Maps, data and decision support integrated from field to office’. A close second was Adam Crick of PDG Helicopters who said ‘GeoField makes mobile data capture simple, cost effective and fast!’.

Oisin wins the Viliv N5 Go-Anywhere PC, and Adam will soon be sporting a natty pair of FIVEPOINT conductive gloves. Both were delighted with their success. Oisin joked he felt a ‘Gwyneth Paltrow moment’ coming on. We hope he’s recovered his composure by now.

The judges also wanted a special mention for Dr. Ed Wallington for his neat summary of GeoField as being like ‘having the entire company knowledge and support in my pocket’. We hope you enjoyed this little diversion. We won’t wait ten years to do it again.

Paul Reid asks what cloud computing means for field work

Over the past five years cloud computing has moved from being the domain of early adopters to providing mainstream systems architecture for major corporations. 

The benefits of remotely hosting and serving business applications and services via the internet ‘cloud’ continue to be debated in organisations around the world.

Those in favour stress the cost benefits that can be realised by renting server capacity from a third party hosting service. Those against raise concerns about the security and reliability of infrastructure that is not internally controlled.

Critics of cloud computing had a field day this April when a failure in Amazon’s EC2 Cloud Services platform forced a number of businesses that rely on this technology to put up closed signs while the Amazon engineers figured out how to get systems back online. 

Regardless of your take on the technology and how it fits yourspecific organisational needs, the event has highlighted both the inherent risks associated with building critical business processes around online services and the need for proper contingency planning.

When building solutions for your mobile workers, reliability is key. The very nature of field work usually means that staff don’t have access to the same level of support as their office-based colleagues. And if your core mobile working solutions are unavailable for any length of time, it may not be possible to simply move on to the next task; the system may not be able to tell what or where the next job is.

‘Work Anywhere’ is a phrase we use to describe one of the key design principles of our GeoField solutions: the core toolset must function reliably regardless of communications availability and the status of your office-based infrastructure. From day one, GeoField has been engineered to work independently of your enterprise systems, with core operational datasets stored locally on the mobile device and updated when a connection becomes available. With GeoField, your field workers will always be ready for business.

We’re launching a free evaluation version of GeoField to let people explore new Ordnance Survey maps

There’s been a revolution in UK digital mapping thanks to the opening up of Ordnance Survey (OS) data through the government’s Making Public Data Public initiative. As well as free maps in OS OpenData™, OS have also launched useful new scale products such as VectorMap™ Local.

And with the launch of the Public Sector Mapping Agreement, public sector workers now have access to Ordnance Survey products right up to OS MasterMap®. Mobile working with maps has never been easier, cheaper and – with cost and competitive pressures everywhere – more important. These developments mean that many more organisations can now use digital mapping to streamline and enrich their fieldwork; increase the efficiency and accuracy of mobile data management or try mobile working for the first time.

So how do you use these great new maps? How do you get them into the field? Without specialist software, digital maps are just big data files. You shouldn’t be tied to your desk or need an expensive GIS to take advantage. The whole point of free data is to maximise the appeal of digital mapping and allow everyone to benefit. 

We want to help people make the most of the map revolution. So this month we are launching a free evaluation version of our leading mobile work management, field mapping and data collection tool, GeoField.

Much more than a field map viewer, this feature-rich evaluation version also allows users to explore GeoField’s data capture, survey and map mark-up tools. We think it is a perfect way to explore the new OS products, try working paper-free or evaluate a full fieldworker efficiency project.

Launched in May in conjunction with OS, GeoField Evaluation Version will be initially bundled with a sample of OS VectorMap™ Local and OS OpenData™ layers. All you need is a tablet, laptop or UMPC and a simple OS licence agreement. Watch out for our new link on the OS websites and from our website. We will be watching the response carefully before deciding how best to expand the service. If you are interested, or you know someone who might be, please pass on the good news or get in touch in the usual way.

Andy Gosney inspects GeoPlace

Until now, many experts in the field have believed that the provision of UK address data has been muddled and wasteful. For a decade, different public bodies in England and Wales have effectively competed to produce a definitive national gazetteer.  On one hand, Ordnance Survey (OS) has used data from Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF), adding a geocode or reference to place that address on the map and merging other government data to create products such as OS MasterMap®Address Layer 2 (AL2).

Quite separately, local government produced the National Land & Property Gazetteer (NLPG). This features addresses created and maintained by local authorities and then qualified and stitched together into a national dataset by the private company Intelligent Addressing. Rather than cooperating, each camp argued its product was superior. Yet studies by the Office of National Statistics showed that each dataset had flaws and only an expensive combination of the two would achieve close to a definitive dataset suitable for the census.

Quietly over the past year, the Local Government Group (LGG) and OS began negotiating a solution. The result is GeoPlace, a joint venture between LGG and OS which has acquired Intelligent Addressing. The new company will continue the work of NLPG and combine the extra elements present in the OS addressing products, especially the greater detail and non postal addresses from AL2.

This new combined product will be known as the National Address Gazetteer (NAG). Over the next three years, NAG will be rolled out to replace the existing, disparate datasets used by the private and public sectors. NAG will also be included in the Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) to allow unrestricted use by all qualified public sector bodies and affiliates.

The solution is not without its critics and there are issues that require attention: Royal Mail’s PAF royalty claims; the absence of Scottish records; impact on the private sector and the fact that key public bodies such as utilities not covered by the PSMA may find the transition to NAG expensive. These are all issues which need to be resolved.

However, many more are championing the new venture and applauding the efficiency improvements it will bring about. After recent approval from the Office of Fair Trading, GeoPlace has been effectively live since 1st April. 

Sigma Seven will continue to support all the relevant datasets our customers use. Thanks to our NLPG Mobile Manager tool, we can also play a significant role in maintaining quality levels for NAG and the other data that our customers collect and manage.

Sigma Seven is expanding its operations in several directions and new team member David Baxter has been helping to support that growth since joining the company at the end of January. A Senior Technical Consultant with the firm, David’s role is split into three main areas: project management for customers; working with the Sigma Seven development team and venturing out of the office to do consultancy work on customer sites.

After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University, David spent fourteen years working in ScottishPower. Asset management systems and enterprise integration are his key areas of expertise. In his current role within Sigma Seven, David is continuing to work with utility customers on internal projects as well as actively managing the implementation of other Sigma Seven projects.

His new role will also see him consulting for other organisations such as the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA). 

‘The skillset I have, and a lot of the concepts which I work with, can be used in lots of different situations,’ says David. ‘They translate very easily to, say, SEPA. SEPA don’t deal with electrical systems but they do deal with river systems and the management of the two have similarities. One small example is that the naming conventions used to signify different river features and so on is similar to the way that the electricity network is labelled.’

‘That sort of transferable knowledge, along with an in-depth understanding of enterprise architecture, means that I can help Sigma Seven offer consultation services to other utilities and many other sectors.’

When not managing enterprise architecture, David enjoys motorsports and keeping fit.