 I'd like to tell you a little bit about my educational background first. I received a bachelor's degree from the University of Akron in geography, and I concentrated on cartographic principles while I was getting that degree. And then I went for a master's degree from Virginia Tech also in geography. That was the early 1980s. And as you can see, I have probably two of the most ugly, strangest logos for sports teams from the two universities I attended. So couldn't do too much about that, but in any event, that's where I did my schooling. I've spent 30 years working in GIS. Most of that has been in the transportation field. While I was in graduate school, I had an internship at the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, which was a really interesting place to work. And then I started my career as a GIS Director Transportation Planner in Johnson City, Tennessee. And that's really when GIS was just getting going in the early 1980s in this country. So it was a very interesting position to hold, building a GIS essentially from the ground up. A lot of work for my GIS efforts there was in transportation, but I also served the city and the surrounding area in general with many different kinds of GIS applications and activities, including building a parcel layer for our entire county. From there, I moved to Pennsylvania and became a Senior Project Manager for Geo Decisions, located in State College. I stayed with Geo Decisions for about 18 years and worked all around the country on GIS transportation projects that I'll tell you a little bit more about in some of the next slides. And from there, I spent a couple of years as a Program Manager with Transcend Spatial Solutions, which was a startup company, and we did much the same kind of work nationwide to take transportation GIS projects. Recently, I took a Senior Principal Program Analyst position with a regional planning agency in Pennsylvania called CEDACOG. I'm doing some very interesting things related to GIS use in this position, including looking at the Marcellus Shale natural gas industry and how GIS can serve that and locate areas for expansion of service. I do have certain areas in GIST that have always been of interest to me. I've done a lot of strategic planning work and all across the country, different types of agencies, you'll be exposed to that in one of my lessons toward the end of the course, where you'll get a chance to do a little bit of work related to strategic planning and learn about its importance. One of the application areas in GIST is straight line diagrams. These may not be familiar to you, but they're very important, they're used in many different kinds of transportation agencies and they provide an additional way to view geospatial data in conjunction with GIS mapping, but this is a sort of a specialized application and I think you'll enjoy seeing how that's used. I'm also very interested in cartographic communication and visualization. I think the use of GIS really reaches its best and highest level if the mapping that's associated with GIS really communicates effectively to the user the intended information. There's a large field associated with this that many professionals are involved with and it's an extremely important aspect of GIS that sometimes doesn't receive enough attention but should communicating messages properly from GIS and the associated mapping. We'll also cover some of that ground in the course later on in some of the lesson work examples and aspects that I'll ask you to look into as part of the course, so do plan to think about how maps are used in GIS. I also have done much work in intelligent transportation systems which is kind of a crossover area with GIS, a very intriguing set of applications and approaches to displaying, analyzing, processing geospatial data in the transportation field. We'll also cover this in the course. One of my non-highway areas of interest is in the airline industry. We'll touch on that a little bit in this course along with other aspects of transportation such as rail and transit. It won't be the major emphasis in the course but if these areas are of interest to you, you'll have a good chance to learn and explore some aspects related to those specific interest fields. Just a couple of photos as to what GIS used to look like about 30 years ago. Yes, that is me on the left side in my younger days and just after GIS got started working down in Tennessee. Just to give you some example of how things have changed, if you don't know what that is in the lower right photo, that's a digitizing table which is not used very much anymore but used to be the preferred way of data creation by digitizing tax maps, highway maps, different kinds of products to put into GIS. The initial equipment that I worked with in Tennessee consisted of many computers as our basis before PCs even came out and graphics terminals that we used like the one on the right side of the picture in the upper left could be very expensive. We bought three graphics terminals for $20,000 each, color graphics terminals back in the early days and the very first high-tech plotter that we used was an electrostatic plotter and it cost $60,000. Things have really changed a whole lot for the better at least as far as how much GIS costs. I also taught GIS right when it was still developing. It was a difficult proposition in many ways. In one respect, there was no textbook available on any aspect of GIS at that point. So I basically gathered information from different places where I could and I put together lab exercises for the students from scratch that worked very well. But obviously now there's a lot more resources available in courses like this and in peripheral places online where you can get training, get good background, do exercises on your own. We'll do a little bit of that in this course. Not so much in every lesson by any means, but it will give you a little bit of a chance to do some hands-on work, but you'll certainly see how GIS is used in transportation and get some appreciation of practical applications as we go through the course. I also did a lot of transportation planning work in my early days, ranging from things such as on the left, a five-year development plan for GIS that incorporated many different aspects of transportation and a general plan project for which major thoroughfare planning was an important aspect and we used GIS to help support that as well. These were evolving applications in those days, but what they really did was point out the value of GIS and how it could be applied in certain areas of transportation. We also looked at linking GIS to travel demand modeling. As you can see the date on this from 1990 was quite a long time ago. It's still an important aspect of GIS, linking travel demand modeling with GIS mapping and outputs and very much something that we'll talk about in the course as well. On the right side here is a report for linear referencing systems. This is a major foundational piece for GIS for transportation and early on in the class we'll cover a lot of principles and how GIS for transportation is built upon linear referencing systems so you'll be exposed a lot to that. So recently I've been in some other aspects of GIS. On the left side is a roadway information field handbook that I worked on for the Ohio Department of Transportation. This links a lot of things together including how information is collected in the field by field personnel, how location referencing plays a part in how the data is collected and referenced and located and how it ultimately ends up in GIS and other kinds of databases for use on an enterprise basis. On the right side is a cover from a report that I did for West Virginia Department of Transportation which was a strategic planning project but also an implementation project and as part of that we identified many different kinds of applications for this agency to move GIS forward and really the emphasis was on enterprise wide GIS expansion throughout the agency. We'll cover that in the course as well and I'll talk quite a bit about how GIS serves as an enterprise tool throughout transportation agencies. One particular application that I've worked with for many years is called straight line diagrams. I won't explain too much about it you can get a good idea of looking at an example here. It's a way to take geospatial data that can be looked at in traditional GIS mapping but put it more into a straight line format so that you can look at specific portions of a roadway or a rail line or some type of transportation feature and see the data that are associated with that feature in this case kind of a stacked straight line display going down the bottom of the page and you can see data tables on the right side. It's just something I wanted to show upfront because it's a good example of a related application that doesn't have to be fully enabled by GIS but has the same basis and can be linked to GIS. So there will be a lot of applications in this course that will be fairly similar where it may not be a pure GIS application but it's something that can be utilized by GIS and linked to GIS functionality. Another place I had a lot of experience in teaching was with a federal program called the National Highway Institute which is an arm of the Federal Highway Administration. I taught for several years course through NHI called Applying Spatial Technologies to Transportation. This was taught onsite at transportation agencies mostly departments of transportation where we went in and taught a two-day seminar course to participants. It was always a very interesting prospect to do this course because every place you went to teach the audience was different. Different kinds of backgrounds, different types of technical people involved with it from planners to engineers and many other kinds of personnel and we always approached it somewhat differently depending on the place where we taught it. The feedback that we got and the interaction that we had was probably the most interesting part of the course. It will be a little contrast for me working with you in this online course where we won't obviously be able to meet face to face but I think we will be able to do a lot of the same things, have a lot of the same good content, results, discussions. We'll be able to do a lot of things online and I'm looking forward to interacting with you using this medium and I'll hopefully be able to put my past experience with the NHI course to work for you in this course. I also wanted to show you a couple of maps where I've worked professionally. I've been involved in over half of the State Departments of Transportation over the years with many different kinds of projects. It has always been very interesting to me to see the differences from State to State or from location to location where I've worked because no two places are the same. No two use GIS exactly in the same way or have the same emphasis in their program. A lot of places have differences in some ways but most places have many of the same current problems, issues, many of the same kind of applications and approaches to managing GIS and making it effective. It's always something that I think you can learn a lot from looking at specific examples and there will be a lot of emphasis on this in this course. There will be many examples from practically every state that you'll be able to see whether it's related to an application, linear referencing systems, organizational factors or something else related to the field. So please do pay attention and learn as much as you can from some of the materials that you'll be seeing in the course that are related from state to state agencies, regional agencies, MPOs, cities and other kinds of government and private agencies. You'll be able to learn a lot from that. So I wish you good luck as the course begins here. Please feel free to contact me through the appropriate channels. I'll be very glad to have as much interaction as possible with this course. And I wish you good luck as we go forward. Thanks for watching this.