LITMIR.BIZ

       Acknowledgments

      No book of this magnitude makes it to publication without a host of people providing critical support along the way. Principal among these is Dr. Kenneth J. Dueker, professor emeritus of Portland State University’s Center for Urban Studies. Although he is now officially retired, Ken continues to be active in his newly adopted community of Kirkland, Washington, where he and his wife, Donna, care for their grandchildren. Ken and I first started talking back in 1994, when we were both reviewers of the work by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) 20-27(2), which developed the first industry data model for transportation geographic information systems. Within a year, Ken and I were co-authoring papers on the subject. Ken has been a mentor, collaborator, and good friend ever since. He was the first person to read the entire final draft. I am grateful that he has provided the foreword to top off his many contributions to this book. Designing Geodatabases for Transportation would not exist without Ken’s guidance over the past 13 years.

      In many ways, this book has been written over a 22-year period with a wide number of “co-authors.” It began in 1986 with Jim Smith and me developing some prototype relational databases for work program administration at the Florida DOT. This effort then grew through Jesse Day, Gordon Morgan, and others to become the Traffic and Roadway Characteristics Reporting system, which resulted in the first statewide GIS in Florida. Switching to local government in 1997, Mayor Claude Ramsey and Assessor of Property Bill Bennett in Hamilton County Tennessee provided the support necessary to expand the state DOT work to meet the needs of local and regional users. Alan Voss at the Tennessee Valley Authority provided considerable professional guidance for the work at Hamilton County. That effort then led to my projects with Mike Wierzbinski and Bill Campbell at Farragut Systems, such as the data model development program at the Colorado DOT, where Tammy Lang, Marvin Koleis, Lou Henefeld, Paul Tessar, and many others both refined the ideas and provided a real-world test of most of the major ideas presented in this book. John Sutton provided the opportunity to work on a very different data structure with Nancy Armentrout at the Maine DOT, which tested the flexibility of the design.

      Along the way, there were others who have contributed ideas and support. Alan P. Vonderohe, Teresa M. Adams, and Nicholas Koncz have to be at the top of that list with their work on the NCHRP 20-27 project. Al Vonderohe also worked with Todd Hepworth to develop the concepts of a linear datum. Bruce Spear and Mark Bradford at the U.S. DOT sponsored a number of efforts that generated ideas on feature identification. Harvey J. Miller and Shih-Lung Shaw, who wrote the very first scholarly book on GIS-T, set the stage for my subsequent work. Even the people who disagreed with some of my ideas, like David Fletcher, Paul Scarponcini, Val Noronha, and Zhong-Ren Peng, helped improve the content of this book through their challenging critiques of earlier work.

      Equally responsible for this book’s publication is the project’s sponsor, Terry Bills, the transportation industry manager at ESRI. Shortly after Terry took the job, he came to me and said, “We need to do something.” Do something, we have. Terry put his money where his mouth is, resulting in this book. His guiding hand was instrumental in setting the direction for the book and making sure that it both met the reader’s needs and was technically correct.

      Aiding Terry and me in that last task were Adrien Litton, Heather McCracken, Eric Floss, and Laurie Cooper of ESRI; and Ron Cihon of the Washington State Department of Transportation. They each spent days reading the draft chapters and offering constructive criticisms. All of these people had to make time in their schedules to get this work done, but no one else could have provided the technical insight and user perspective.

      The work of all of these people would never have reached your hands without the hard work of people at ESRI Press. My editor was Mike Kataoka, who worked with designers Donna Celso and Jennifer Hasselbeck, graphics editor Jay Loteria, and copy editor Julia Nelson to produce the book under the guidance of Judy Hawkins, former ESRI Press manager, and Peter Adams, current manager. Stacks of written pages and scores of figures have been transformed into this attractive book through their hands.

      I also thank David Arctur and Michael Zeiler, authors of the ESRI Press publication, Designing Geodatabases, for setting the standard for geodatabase design books, and Steve Grisé, chief data modeler for ESRI, for providing much of the data model development guidance contained in the book.

      Of course, all the folks at ESRI and ESRI Press work for Jack and Laura Dangermond, whose financial support of this book was critical. But their support goes further than the ESRI checkbook. ESRI, under Jack’s leadership, has been pursuing ways to open up the transportation world to GIS for 20 years with product functions like dynamic segmentation and support of industry data-modeling efforts like the Unified Network for Transportation (UNETRANS) effort at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

      The people who were especially patient with me while I wrote the book are those who allowed me to make time for this extra task. Most notable in this list of friends and family is my wife, Robin, who endured many lonely nights while I sat in the home office typing away. David A. Wheeler, city engineer for the city of Ocoee, Florida, also provided patient support by allowing me as much as two months at a time away from contract work in his office to write the book. They and numerous others had to experience my frequent response to a request to do something for them: “I can’t right now, I have to work on the book.”

      Well, that task is finished. Only you can decide how well it was done. If you can find something in this publication that helps you solve a problem with transportation geodatabase design, then I guess it was worth it.

       About the author

      J. Allison “Al” Butler has worked for state, regional, and local transportation agencies during a 30-year career, focusing on the built environment and information technology. He has been an innovator in spatial database design, traffic engineering, planning policy, public utilities, and economic development, and has authored more than 75 published works in those fields. Mr. Butler played a key role in developing the GIS professional certification program and, with Dr. Kenneth J. Dueker, co-developed the Enterprise GIS-T database design. He is a frequent conference speaker and workshop instructor on a variety of topics, including highway safety, geodatabase design, agency management, and land use planning. Al Butler is a licensed contractor and a certified planner, mapping scientist, and GIS professional.

Скачать книгу