I see many of our customers at their locations and they have map books out frequently. A map book is a book with all of the various low-level maps for a city on single pages, and often times, when dispatching a driver somewhere, they will tell them they need to go to “Map book Las Vegas, Page 25, 5D (let’s say “Heather St.”).
I bought a couple major metro map books today (Phoenix and Las Vegas) thinking we could help our customers in these markets by integrating the map boundary definitions into GPS Insight (but not the images/content – that would be copyright infringement). We want to help the map company sell MORE books because it will be much easier for our customers to use them if we can integrate.
Scanning a couple of pages for MY use, I’m able to pull them into GPS Insight as an overlay (I also talk about overlays and similar concepts for the US Army here):
Then by scanning and overlaying an actual “map page” we can get precise boundaries for each page:
We can then create a “placemark” and put the “pin” precisely at the bottom left corner of the box:
Then we are able to quickly determine the latitude/longitude of each of the 4 box corners. A shortcut for doing so is to right-click the placemark and choose “directions from” which populates the latitude/longitude into the “directions” box:
Because the boxes above/below/next to each share the same points, these latitudes/longitudes don’t need to be computed for every single corner.
Now that we have that information, I will have the ability to put a new capability into GPS Insight which does the following:
- Takes a street address and quickly determines the Map Page/Quadrant
- Allows the user to enter the map page & alpha-numeric “box” and takes them there
- Allow the user to report on activity within a certain map page or even alpha-numeric box
We can do the first one simply right now by typing in the address and simply viewing which map page/alphanumeric box the address is in.
It will take a little bit of development time to allow us to choose a map page and “A-6″ style box in order to take us there, but this is something which we will easily complete within a few hours of work given GPS Insight’s quick turnaround on custom requirements such as this.
Then running a report for a particular area can be done automatically as well, but I will do so manually here using our existing polygon geofence capabilities:
Create a polygon geofence around the square (whether the map page or just a alphanumeric box in question):
We can be EXTREMELY precise when defining the geofence:
Here is the full polygon:
Then we can run a quick report on “Page24″ within GPS Insight to see which vehicles were there, when, and for how long:
7 vehicles went to this location, based on our extremely accurate report — this report completes within 10 seconds and runs through tens of thousands of pieces of information to give you exactly the information you require:
Once we get the map page enhancements into the GPS Insight product, we’ll probably make them freely available, and I’ll update this blog entry. We will document this where we document all of our product enhancements at http://support.gpsinsight.com.
Thanks,
Rob.