SPOTS IN SPOTS FOR GIS: INTEROPERABILITY BETWEEN ARCGIS, QGIS AND STRABOSPOT (UPDATE)

The StraboSpot Data System (Strabo) currently serves the structural geology and tectonics communities as an all-in-one system for acquisition of data in the field via mobile app available on the Android and iOS platforms. It uses a searchable graph database characterized by complex data entry organized by the relationships between and within 'Spots' where each 'Spot' is a set of field observations defined by spatial extent. Strabo meets a multitude of open-source technological needs for the geoscience community by saving time and effort in the collection and analyzation of data, providing an effective method of collaborating in and out of the field, and improving access to complete field datasets instead of relying on subsets published in articles.

Strabo is designed for field data collection, so is not intended to be a complete GIS. Doing basic topology and cartography requires processing power and software development which is not practical to include in Strabo. Thus, we have been developing methods which allow Strabo to be interoperable with ArcGIS (ArcMap Add-In) and QGIS (Python Plug-In). These methods allow for the download and upload of Strabo data in each GIS through REST communication with the server as well as an easier method of uploading native-GIS data to Strabo via the existing shapefile uploader tool. Several universal challenges arose during the development process at both the dataset and 'Spot' levels due to the need to 'flatten' the graph database structure of StraboSpot to work within the relational database structure of a GIS. We also had to develop solutions for viewing images and the information associated with them in a GIS environment which does not display an image in its original pixel coordinate system. Additionally, since ArcGIS does not natively accept the data format of Strabo datasets, GeoJSON, custom conversion scripts had to be written to reformat the data. QGIS does natively import GeoJSON, but nested attributes must be parsed out for individual data entries to be displayed within the attribute table. By utilizing the Add-In or Plug-In, Strabo users will be able to efficiently analyze their data in a GIS environment and upload any changes back to Strabo.