iPads and Map Books

[dixie_flatline]

(I tried doing a search but either there is no previous discussion on the topic or I couldn't come up with clear enough search terms.)

We are in the corner of our county, situated where we respond into our first due, several other stations' areas within our county, as well as into Baltimore County, Anne Arundel County, BWI airport, and (super rarely) Baltimore City. Between county ADC maps and detailed binders showing unit numbers for apartment/townhouse complexes, we have at least 7 map books on our unit. Boats/ships and airplanes are moving their charts to electronic form - why not us? The laptops (Mobile Data Terminal) on the units receive CAD information for calls in our county, and are pretty reliable at showing the incident location on a map. However, they aren't foolproof, and have 0 map data for any calls outside of Howard County.

Obviously the best solution would be to integrate this into the MDT laptop, but that is owned/operated/administered by the county, not our volunteer station. Anyone out there have any experience using an iPad to replace/augment map books on your unit? Google Maps is certainly an option (the iPad is 3G so it has a data connection and GPS at all times), but GMaps doesn't really have granular enough data. I can look into my detailed map book to see that Unit 306 is on the far side of the apartment complex at 4201 Grand Street and direct my driver to the spot, rather than just showing up and trying to see numbers on buildings or follow poorly-lit signs.

The only public safety-specific application I saw in my search was the whole kit by Zoll (ePCR/RescueNet), which looked like it required an enterprise-level commitment to the whole Zoll package. Since we can't effect change at the county level with the MDTs or any of that back-end stuff, I'm thinking that a better solution is probably an app designed for truckers or delivery people - it should have maps, as detailed as possible - preferably stored offline to speed up responsiveness (and ensure that losing the data connection doesn't kill your map book).

Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?

 

[JCyrus]

How are your map books actually created? Assuming they're computer generated, there's a good chance that they were exported as a PDF before printing, even if generated through GIS software or the like. From there, you could get the original PDF's from whoever made the maps and load them onto an iPad or tablet with iBooks or any other software capable of loading PDFs.

Even if you don't have access to the originals, another option would be to simply take the pages out of your map books and use a scanner/copier to scan each page into PDF format onto a computer. From there, you would simply do the same as the first option and load it onto your tablet in PDF format using whatever software you have available to you.

I am sure there are software packages that could do this more easily either out of the box or with minor modification. You could even do it with ArcGIS, but those would both be potentially resource intensive. If your goal however is to condense paper map books into digital material readable on a tablet, I'd say PDF is your best bet.