Each year, the Indiana Geographic Information Council recognizes individuals and organizations for their use of geospatial technology to improve our world with the Excellence in GIS Award.
At the 2022 Indiana GIS Conference in late May, Tom Laue, Technical Specialist V – Gas, was recognized for his work geocoding line locate tickets for gas transmission.
Geocoding is the process of transforming a description of a location – such as a pair of coordinates, an address, or the name of a place – to a location on the earth's surface.
One of many measures in place at Citizens Energy Group to mitigate the potential for third-party excavation damage to the gas transmission system is the review, validation, and follow-up on locate requests in the vicinity of the transmission system. Citizens receives approximately 15,000 locate requests per year. The locations in the requests must be plotted as points on a map for the cathodic protection field crews to find.
Prior to the completion of Laue’s project, handling, distributing, and managing transmission locate tickets was a very cumbersome manual process.
Laue created a script that extracts relevant information, such as street address, city, state, and township, from the request tickets (which are emails converted to .txt files). In addition, he developed an automated process to create points in the mapping system.
Because geocoding is not an exact science and points often need adjusted, Laue added several checks and steps in the process to get the points as close as possible to their true location.
“Tom achieved a high level of accuracy that you usually can’t get without some human intervention,” said Derek Elliott, Systems Support Specialist II. “As such, he is very deserving of the award from the Indiana Geographic Information Council.”
Laue also recently received NEXT certification from the Quality department for this project, which saves five to seven hours of labor per week.
