Attack of the Creatures from the Deep
All our standard AGOL tricks, a lot of FME wizardry, and a Hub Premium.
This is a mediteranean Fanworm
Quite pretty isnt it?
This is a Mediterranean Fanworm and a few thousand of his mates having a rapid reproduction party on the bottom of your boat
This is Sam from Bay of Plenty Regional Council thinking "Oh no".
Its Sam's job to make sure Mediterannean Fanworm does not spread throughout the Bay of Plenty and other regions and cause an environmental catastrophy. You see, fanworms are very, very contagious.
This is Grant from Northland. His job to make sure Mediterranean Fanworm does not spread in the pristine waters he works in. Here he is with a grand-daddy of a Mediterranean Fanworm - in Auckland.
This is every possible place that a Mediterranean Fanworm could be happily residing on the bottom of your boat in the top of the North Island right now.
So, in order to stop this pest from spreading to every harbour, bay, beach and reef in New Zealand, Sam and Grant simply have to visit all these locations, see if they have Fanworm there and kill it before its spreads.
The problem is of course that boats move, and by the time Grant gets back to Northland to warn everyone about the grand-daddy fanworm that he found in Auckland, heaps of boats infected by that grand-daddy, may have moved to a new place where Sam might be thinking "where the hell did this come from?"
So that is, or course, where we come in. Using the Power of Where we simply create a system to keep track of what Sam and Grant find and keep track of the movement of the boats.
There is just one tiny problem.
We dont know which boat is which.
Because in New Zealand, there is no national boat register, so there are no unique identifiers for boats. Yes, here in Aotearoa, boats just happily float around, moving freely from harbour to harbour, innocently spreading an invasive pest animal that, left unchecked, will engulf our fragile native marine ecosystems and cause uncalculable damage. Its like being asked to recreate the covid tracer app but no-one knows whose phone is whose.
We began by recording details of boats and, using a very clever process we developed in FME (sorry Esri), gave them each a unique identifer which was created from attributes that we could idenfity. Hull colour, boat type, boat name (if it had one), boat length.... that sort of thing.
We recorded a few boats, refined the process, recorded a few more boats, refined the process again, and then sent Sam and Grant (and the rest of their teams) out there to continue inputting data and, very importantly, take a photo of all 8,423 boats that we wanted to keep track of.
We then we checked our unique boat IDs for duplicates.
Incredibly, out of over 7 thousand records, only two shared the same unique ID but were different boats. (which we could tell after putting the photos side-by-side. They were very very similar looking boats with the same name)
We changed one of the characters in one of the duplicates, created the worlds most insane FieldMaps / Survey123 combo field app, and sent Sam and Grant back out into the water.
And then sat back in out nice warm offices drinking good coffee and watched the data unfold on the dashboards.
Now, let the chaos begin...
Of course the story doesn't end there. They didn't get us to build all this on a Hub just so we could take advantage of the confusing and unintuitive site builder interface. No, the plan was always to bring the public into this system as well.
So the next step was to create a system for the public to "Claim My Boat" and not only see all the data we are collecting on it, but add some of their own as well. So they needed to access our feature layers, but only see the data for their boat on those layers
So, we came up with 3 options:
- Create a View and Group for every single named user that signs up to the portal (potentially 100,000 views... yeah, nah)
- Publish a slave feature service of the authoritative data, set it to "only see own features" and use Willy's trick to edit the totally non-editable attributes in the editor tracking fields. (but I lose a year off my life every time i watch him do it)
- Ask Enric to design and build something in FME that i didn't realise was possible.
I decided to go with option 3.
Now, whenever a member of the public creates a new named user on the hub and claims their boat, a document link file gets uploaded to their content which points to a beautifully formatted HTML file, store on our web server which is seamlessly embedded in their version of the My Boat page.
So the next obvious question you may have is - "Hold on. How do you verify that a person actually owns the boat they are claiming? You literally begun this presentation by saying there was no boat registration in New Zealand!" And that would be a very astute query. To be honest we don't have that part completely nailed yet. We are currently waiting on the regional councils, the marina operators, and apparently a heap of lawyers, to supply us with the owner/occupier data for as many moorings and marina berths as they can gather together. Then when a new user fills in the Survey 123 form to claim a boat, we get one of our humans to cross check the data for that "place" with what we have on file for that boat and where it has been seen and, if she is convinced its all above board, assign the unique BoatID to that username.
Of course i should be totally happy with that method as a long term sustainable plan (which also keeps someone in full time employment) and I certainly should not be investigating creating an A.I. automation to verify the data for us.... But, then, what would i have to present on at next year's user conference?
Oh right, i nearly forgot - the link for the hub is here by the way. https://marine-pests-ton-mvp.hub.arcgis.com/
This is the most complex thing we have built, but right now, its the most exciting. Until now we have created systems for industry professionals and skilled volunteers to record, analyse and report on very specific tasks to help save our native taonga. This is the first time we have created something that empowers any member of the public to contribute tiny packets of data that contribute to a potentially enormous spatial, temporal dataset that could show us exactly how these pests are spreading, where the are now, how we can stop them and allow all of us, professionals and public alike...
To See What Others Can't.