U.S. CENSUS 2010 SUPPORTED BY ARCPAD MOBILE GIS TECHNOLOGY

ArcPad, the Australian developed Geographical Information Software (GIS) software is to play a key role in collection of data for the 2010 US Census.

As evidence of the size of the undertaking the 2010 US Census is being preceded by a $US600 million five year program to develop and implement an automated system for field data collection.

Known as the FDCA program the system will support upto 500,000 field 'enumerators' who will follow up and collect survey data from households that do not return their census forms.

The US Census Bureau has appointed Harris Corporation of Florida as the system integrator and prime contractor to develop and implement an automated system for field data collection. Harris will use the ArcPad mobile GIS platform supplied by ESRI Inc. to enable the field personnel to capture and record data in near real time.

ArcPad was developed by Melbourne based GIS software company Maptel in the mid 1990's to provide a mobile GIS system to equip field-based personnel with the ability to capture, analyse and display geographic information in near real time by interfacing with a mobile hand held computer.

ArcPad quickly assumed a significant user base in Australia in local government, security and emergency services in particular, empowering employees in the field to undertake field mapping, asset inventories, maintenance requirements, property inspections and incident reporting. Maptel's Executive Director Jeff Bailey said that in 1999 ESRI Inc. the world's largest GIS software company acquired an equity stake in his company and also purchased the international licence to distribute their ArcPad software.

"ESRI is the undoubted international leader in GIS with a client base of over 300,000 users worldwide, including the 200 largest cities in the USA, most national governments, more than two-thirds of the Fortune top 500 companies and over 7,000 colleges and universities."

ESRI applications including ArcPad are running on more than a million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers to provide the backbone for the world's mapping and spatial analysis.

"Our Melbourne office has worked closely with ESRI and its project partner Harris Corporation, the system integrator and prime contractor for the FDCA program for the US Census Bureau, to enhance and upgrade features of our ArcPad software.

"Each of the 500,000 in field personnel collecting 2010 Census data will have a mobile hand held computer with GPS indicator giving a visual display of a planned survey route with non-response address assignments" Bailey added.

The field collection personnel for the US 2010 Census will have 13 temporary regional centres that will manage field data collection with 455 local Census offices with management and clerical staff.

The 500,000 field staff will be temporary workers who will conduct the bulk of the data collection work.

"Our Melbourne based Maptel development team has worked closely with ESRI & Harris to further customise our ArcPad software to support tasks like navigation, adding and removing residential addresses and updating street features during the data collection task.

"As an indication of the magnitude of the 2010 US Census we believe it will be the biggest ever single deployment of a GIS software program world wide and certainly the biggest ever single deployment internationally of an Australian developed software platform" Jeff Bailey added.

Key contributors to the further development of the Australian developed ArcPad GIS software are Maptel's personnel Stephen Quan and Executive Director Jeff Bailey.

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