FME User Spotlight: Adam Jonasson, City of Grand Forks
North Dakota GIS Services, GIS
Coordinator, FME User for 3 years
What are you working on right now?
Right now we are working on a mapping application to review crime statistics. Our police records application doesn’t have spatial data and addresses are saved in a different address format than our GIS database – plus they have multiple ways to enter an incident – as a standard address, an intersection, or hundred block of a certain street or avenue. With some tricky geocoding and joins to the non-spatial data, we’re mapping six years of data, and it takes less than 25 minutes to run. We could never accomplish this daily task without FME.
We hear you have something in common with the Mars rover Curiosity...
This spring, we worked with earthmine Inc out of Berkeley, California to collect street-level 3D 360-degree images. Earthmine uses a similar image collection system to the system that is used on the Mars rover. They collected over 400 miles of street-level images for the city of Grand Forks. We are using those photos for GIS data collection and general city information.
Do you have any tips for other FME Users?
There is always a way! If you think that FME can’t do what you need done, just sleep on it and try it again the next day. Many times I have left for the day thinking there isn’t a way to accomplish what I need to do, but by the next morning I have thought of something new to try or found a new tool in FME to use.
What are you doing when you’re not working?
I am married with three kids and two dogs – we just got two whippet pups in November. I enjoy the outdoors, especially camping in the summer with my family. We keep our camper on an island on a Minnesota lake for 5 weeks in the summer. I also enjoy listening to music and traveling to see some of my favorite performers. This past summer my wife and I drove 15 hours, each way, to see a concert at Red Rocks in Denver, CO. It was fantastic!
If you were an FME Transformer, which one would you be?
If I had to pick one that I use the most, it would be the Joiner. I think just about every script I run has a join of some sort in it. I would say that that fits me as well; if I were a transformer I would make a good Joiner, as I like bringing people and data together to get things done.
