Crossroads of GIS and Public Safety: My Journey with Gistic Research
November 10, 2024
I still remember meeting Dr. Bo Guo of Gistic Research, roughly a decade back at the Arizona GIS Council’s (AGIC) education and training symposium in Yuma AZ. AGIC gatherings were more than just meetings—they were reunions with a group of people you actually wanted to see. There I was, moving between sessions, engrossed in all things GIS, when Bo pulled me aside. Now, when someone like Bo—the guy who could talk about Linear Reference Systems (LRS) like he invented it—wants to show you something, you make time.
He led me to a demo of one of his latest tools, an application designed to visualize DOT assets associated with LRS data. It was more than just functional; it was almost elegant in how it allowed users to locate a route, move forwards and backward, and see assets along the way. For the time, it was beautiful, innovative, and unmistakably ahead of the curve. Bo wasn’t just some tech guy; he was one of the top authorities on DOT LRS data, and getting a private glimpse into his world of linear referencing felt like a backstage pass to the heart of GIS technology.
A couple of years later, Arizona launched its NG9-1-1 compliance effort as a pilot project, and I found myself right in the middle of it, knee-deep in the task of validating multi-agency public safety GIS data. This was my first experience with NG9-1-1 GIS validation, and I was fascinated by the potential impact on public safety over what we had built for E9-1-1. Right at the start of our thirteen-month data development effort, Bo reached out again. This time, he wanted to introduce me to a SaaS tool he was working on as a proof of concept called AZGIV. It was an entirely different system from the client-based validation software that the State had picked out for me—it was map-based, sync-capable with ArcMap, markup-less if you wanted it to be and it had this anomaly queuing system that just made sense. AZGIV’s approach felt revolutionary, not just for validation, but for integrating multi-agency data in ways that I’d only started to envision and before anything else was like it in the market. Bo’s ideas always seemed one step ahead.
A couple of years later, after a few shifts in my career, Bo caught wind and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, a bit of skin in the game if you will, and the freedom to contribute in ways that felt both familiar and exciting. Now, as part of the Gistic team, I get to bring decades of GIS experience to GIVE, our newest in a line of applications. It’s surreal to have a hand in shaping a product from the ground up and to sign off on features.
And the best part? We’re getting ready to unveil something completely unique in GIVE for validating, visualizing and correcting the relationship between MSAG records and road centerline features. We’ve drawn on all our experience managing LRS data for this, and if you’ve ever had to balance MSAG and road centerline data yourself, you’ll understand why this matters and just how painful that process really is. The only way to manage that relationship in short order has been to generate an RCL-based MSAG—and just my personal opinion, I wouldn’t make that leap with just any RCL dataset and there’s a time and place for that. Our new feature, which we call Legacy Sync, will work seamlessly with ALI data as well. Stay tuned for more on this game-changer in my next post as I’ll include a short video of it in action.
I know we’re building something that will make a serious mark on the industry. If I had to scrub through an NG9-1-1 GIS dataset again? No contest—I’d choose GIVE. In the software world, we call that “eating your own dog food.”