Finally back from Manifold’s course

This week has been hard, after an excellent technician who was for over a year in the project with us has resigned; so I had to make the seminars that he was going to give on Manifold for municipal use. At the same time I must prepare two new replacement instructors.

The first workshop was a Microstation review three weeks ago, but also included to show some equivalence with AutoCAD, the one of this week has been the transition from preparation based data in Microstation Geographics to be imported into Manifold Systems.

The good numbers:

The good numbers are: 10 students, 1 instructor, 2 instructor’s candidates and 4 training days. Since the transfer car to the hotel was from the Project and I got cranky because some did not meet the tasks of the preview seminar, we finally left at 8 pm a few days… so it was helpful.

And later: 6 hours, a technician, 1.12 m pixel for rural area. We’ve used Stitch Maps to download from Google Earth all the high-resolution image of the 10 municipalities involved…

Also 3 hours, a technician, 34 control point. Georeferencing the downloaded image with Microstation Descartes, and then we have merged them and cut into sections of interest by town…

Finally 2 hours, 10 activated licenses, 3 technicians. We should bring CPU’s to a Cybercafé so as to connect to the Internet and activate the Manifold GIS licenses…

The bad numbers:

The area has a poor electrical power distribution system, at least 4 times per day energy was gone and although the local had a power plant not all machines have battery… a gain that Microstation has auto saved but with Manifold more than one lost 40 minutes of work by not saving often.

What follows:

This course was aimed at building data, the result of the workshop has been creating maps of roads and hydrology that had to be done using the 1:50,000 map sheet for place names and the downloaded image to draw streets, rivers and streams. We build them using Microstation Geographics, and then we did cleaning topology and nodes connection; finally it was exported via “fence file” on separate levels and v7 to v8 conversion using batch converter … all a religious experience as Enrique Iglesias would say.

The next course will be held in three weeks when we hope to build topographic layer, cadastral and soil. Also, the analysis application and data management with Manifold may be done.

Finally the last course will include administrative layers, index and images of what the course should include with the publication of IMS services, creation of output layouts and data exchange with GvSIG, AutoCAD Map and Bentley Map.