It has been about a year and a half since ILGISA began working with the Office of the Illinois Statewide 9-1-1 Administrator on Illinois’s migration to Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1). Around this time last year, a group of ILGISA Members formed a committee to work alongside Cindy Barbera-Brelle (Statewide 9-1-1 Administrator) to develop the GIS Policy Document and Data Standards. This update will cover some of the accomplishments to date, as well as what is to come.
In the fall of 2018, the committee finalized the IL NG9-1-1 Data Standards and IL NG9-1-1 Governance Policy documents. In conjunction with the documents, there was a series of regional presentations across the state that provided information on the NG9-1-1 project as a whole, the role of GIS, and the documents that were created for the project. The presentation and the documents can all be accessed at the Illinois Statewide Administrator’s Project Website.
Towards the end of the 2018 calendar year, the committee released two additional resources. The first was an NG9-1-1 Readiness Checklist. The document provides data stewards with the process preparation, data creation, data validation, and delivery methodology. The document provided links to resources for specific tasks, as well as, contact resources per region for those that have questions or concerns. It is important to note that this is a living document and as the project progresses, more resources and processes will be added to provide data stewards an accurate path to success.
The second resource released by the committee was the IL NG9-1-1 Geodatabase Template. Inside this compressed folder you will find two different geodatabases, one with and one without the topology rules. Topology, while not available on all licensing levels, is a vital component to ensure the accuracy of call routing in an NG9-1-1 system. Each Geodatabase has feature datasets for the Required, Strongly Recommended, and Recommended project feature classes and alias tables. The geodatabase is preset with domains and values. Those domain values can be viewed in spreadsheets that are supplied alongside geodatabases in the compressed folder. An XML database schema is also provided if you wish to generate your own geodatabase and import the schema. Both of these resources can also be found on the Illinois Statewide Administrator’s Project Website.
In 2019, the committee has continued to work on the project. There have been a series of regional meetings to discuss the project with local data stewards and data maintainers across the state. These meetings have provided positive feedback to the committee and helped re-shape policy and data standards for the project. The committee has also set up a temporary data storage system and has begun the process of aggregating data for the project. This aggregation of Public Service Access Point (PSAP) boundaries provided our first look at the statewide data coverage as it stands today. As the project progresses, it will grow into a fully functional statewide GIS.
Later this year training will begin for data stewards and data maintainers across the State. The training will aim to familiarize everyone with the process and the data needed for the projects success. ILGISA is thankful for this opportunity and proud of how it’s helping the State and our industry move into the future through GIS. A statewide GIS initiative of this magnitude is very exciting for Illinois and we are hopeful that the project will lay the groundwork for many other GIS focused collaborations at a state level.

Eric Creighton
ILGISA President
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Edited by Thomas O'Malley
Outreach Committee Chair

Several nights this Spring a team from the Adler Planetarium launched balloons into the night sky.  Altho not specifically in celebration, cheers resounded as the balloon reached altitude and hundreds of images of the nighttime landscape below were captured.  Each flight contributed immediately useful information that was then applied to the next flight, culminating in a seriously successful flight the night of April 29th over Kankakee and the surrounding area. 
 
 
Designed to measure the nature and intensity of artificial light spilling upwards into the night sky, these flights are part of the on-going NITESat project, part of the larger twelve-year old Far Horizons Program.  Ken Walczak, project manager, and Geza Gyuk head up the team, which includes an ever-changing, enthusiastic group of interns and volunteers.

 These first flights allowed the team to fine-tune their cameras’ aperture size, length of exposure, and frequency of image capture.  Three cameras capture slightly differing views of the landscape.  One points directly downward, truly a nadir view, while the other cameras flank this central lens, collecting images at an oblique angle of about 20 degrees.  A series of subsequent flights are scheduled in this ongoing project.
 

 After capturing the imagery, the individual images are sorted to select the best shots in the sequence – there is much intended redundancy.  Remember the balloon is propelled by our variable winds, moving at irregular speeds while performing slow pirouettes as it travels across the night sky.  Not every image will be of usable quality.  The selected images are “stitched” together to form a mosaic of the landscape over which the balloon flew.  Images must then be registered to the actual ground.  While the cameras geotag the images when captured, the precision of this step is not sufficient to really lockdown the nighttime balloon imagery over another set of imagery captured during the day -  the aerials typically seen on Internet mapping sites.  Those road intersections and building corners are kinda hard to make out in night-captured imagery. ​