February 22, 2007 (Livonia, MI) – Cognet GIS, the GIS division of the The COGNET Group, a Livonia Michigan based IT firm, announces a new pilot program for Emergency Management Services with the Town of Groton, Massachusetts.
Emergency Management Mapping is the key initiative that brought the Town of Groton to Cognet in mid 2006 to create a pilot program for the Groton Fire Department. The program utilizes GTViewer, a powerful, high speed viewing tool for rendering the cities geospatial data into a hand held device to be used for mapping the town's infrastructure during an emergency situation, such as a fire.
Christopher Coutu, GIS Analyst for the Groton Water department, responsible for the program's creation, had been searching for a hand held application that would render the data from their primary GIS Application, ESRI, into a format that was fast enough to be used during an emergency. He stopped looking when he found GTViewer.
“Being able to locate houses during an emergency increases our full situational awareness significantly,” said Coutu. “We found GTViewer provided the best 'out of the box' mix of functionality and price.”
Larry Cosgrove, GIS Practice Lead for Cognet, worked with Chris to convert their GIS data from Shape files into the native GTViewer format. Once the initial conversion is done, files can easily be moved back and forth between GTViewer and the primary GIS application.
The pilot program at the Town of Groton is expected to extend into other departments as the new and innovative ways are being developed to utilize the hand held GIS device for public works field data collection and emergency management.
About The Cognet Group
The COGNET Group is an Information Technology Consulting firm that specializes in Enterprise Application Development and Geospatial Information Systems. They can be found on the web at
www.thecognetgroup.com.
Media Contact:
John Roach
734-591-6052 x 231
