Below the Tearline — Mapping Project Update

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. Today I thought I would take some time to explain some of the updates to the mapping projects that I'm working on because things have gotten quite expansive. It's become quite a large uh endeavor and there are a few different things that I think might be helpful to explain in this sort of format. I didn't want to bury this in the weekend update this week. So I wanted to have a a dedicated video that I can point people to in the future when they have a question about something like an online map or a data layer or something like that. So, just keep that in mind if you're watching this in the future. This is how things stand as of April 2025. If you're watching this several months or even years in the future, things may be a little bit out of date because this is uh changing rather quickly. This is kind of a developmental thing. So, when developmental things are talked about, things change quite a bit. At the moment, I've got four main lines of effort which are in various stages of completion. The first most obvious one that you guys probably have seen me talk about quite a bit are the online maps. So, I am working mostly within the ArcGIS ecosystem. Now, there's pros and cons to this, which we'll get into in a moment, but right now, this is mostly an onlinebased mapping system. I know not perfect, but it's what I'm going with for now. And this will become apparent as to why in a moment. So, the online maps, I have two of them at the moment. One of them is the main one, the SIP cop main, the common intelligence picture, common operating picture main. Uh, I've just renamed it to being the common intelligence picture. It's the main map that I throw most things on. If there's an event going on around the world, check this map and chances are I will probably be zoomed into it watching it or I will be plotting stuff. This is the working document. This is the main place to be for anything going on around the world. I have an entirely separate map altogether for tracking events or showing data layers pertaining to the border crisis. So the United States Mexico border crisis. I have been working on this for a while. And the reason that I have this on a completely separate map altogether is because the the types of data layers that I'm going to need to display on that map are going to be very different than what I'm going to display on the main uh map. So, since these are online maps and they're very very heavy on the RAM usage by a computer, it's really best to keep things as as simple as possible and to keep, you know, tens of thousands of points off of maps if if if you can help it. So, the border crisis map is going to have a lot of imagery overlays. is going to have a lot of random points, a lot of layers that I can bring in from other people and it's it's going to be worthy of its own separate map. So that's why I have things arranged that way. If something else goes on around the world, I already have templates already kind of in my, you know, hidden in in my folders so that I can activate a special map for a special region just in case things start popping off in a very significant way around the planet that would require me to have a separate map for that. The other main project I have is what I'm calling the dashboard. Now, ArcJS calls this experiences. It's their marketing term for essentially a dashboard. The reason that it's a little bit confusing is because ArcGIS actually has a separate feature called the dashboard feature, but it really sucks. It's not helpful. So, the experiences is kind of the way to refresh that. And essentially what it is is a way of for me to display a lot of different stuff in a dashboard format. So, I can display the main uh map. I can bring in the border crisis map. So I kind of leave that. I can display two maps at the same time. I can show multiple of the same map but zoomed into different areas of the planet. So uh for instance I just kind of tend to zoom into places which are a little bit you know more helpful. Something's going on someplace I can zoom in but it's all displaying the same map. I can also display things like maps and charts. I can bring in my Obsidian notes. Uh for those of you who are aware, I all of my wire reports, all of the clickable sources and links for how I put together these uh intelligence reports, all of that is contained within Obsidian, a a sort of third party uh notetaking app. But what I can do is bring that in to the dashboard so that I can display text on the screen and I can update it in real time. So this is something that is I don't know how common it is. cuz I when I was doing this professionally, it wasn't very common at all. But it probably should be more common for I guess uh more professional intelligence groups to have this kind of architecture for arranging how their talk is laid out, their tactical operations center. Right? So essentially what you want to have in your office uh if you're so inclined or you're interested in this kind of thing is you can dedicate an entire monitor to this. So, I created this map dashboard solely for that reason, so that you can throw this uh web page up on a monitor if you've got a spare monitor. You can even throw it up on a projector and just use that. But it's kind of a one-stop shop place where you can someone can walk in, look at this for 30 seconds, and understand what's going on around the world. So, that's kind of the way uh that that works uh with the dashboard. Now, the cons with the dashboard is that it pulls a lot a lot of memory from your web browser. So, chances are if you're running the dashboard, at least for me, I mean, my computer's not that bad. But generally speaking, if I've got the dashboard up, I can't really run anything else in that browser. So, I don't know, your experience may vary, but that's kind of the way uh I use it at the moment is just kind of having a one-stop shop, one screen look at look at the screen to see what's going on around the world. The next line of effort is what I'm calling the Nexus. Now, this is something new. I have not announced this, so this is the first time you're probably hearing about this. So this is essentially ArcGIS has in their ecosystem a very primitive and very simple website builder. So this is what this is. This is what I'm calling the S2 underground nexus. It's just a website template, but it's it's a little bit different than a normal website in that I can bring in a lot of other things inside the ArcGIS ecosystem such as maps. I can show my online map on the web page. I can bring in YouTube tutorials. I can bring in uh other things such as surveys. So on the Nexus, the Nexus will be the chief spot for filing reports. So yes, I finally have not just one but a series of tip lines that you can go in and file a report on. So if you are interested in submitting information, the Nexus here, this is going to be the chief spot for sending me information uh about something going on around the planet. And you can see on the Nexus what kinds of reports are there. So I've got multiple ones. I've got a general tip line. I've got things for spotting aircraft and drones and all kinds of stuff, right? So if you're more of a sigant guy, you're more of a radio nerd and you start picking up hostile radio transmissions, you can go in and there's a special report format for that uh to let me know about these sorts of things. But there's also things like logistical shortages. So, if you go to the grocery store and see that, oh, wow, we're going through another another bout of uh logistical challenges or supply shortages. Remember the COVID years where everything was out of stock or something like that and I was tracking all these logistical shortages around the country? Well, now there's a better way for doing that. You can even scan the barcode of uh items uh just using your phone and report it to me that ah this this item is out of stock. So, I don't know how much use these are going to get right now. I'll talk about that in a moment. But right now, this is kind of the the ecosystem that I'm setting up. Now, again, this may be a gigantic failure. I have no idea. I would be willing to bet that probably 90% of what people submit is not going to be helpful or or usable, but we're going to give it a try, right? So, I've got these tools available to me, so I might as well use them. So, we'll give it a shot. And finally, all of this data, literally every bit of it, is available as a layer. So all of the things that are going to populate on the on the the online maps like the common intelligence picture or some of the stuff on the dashboard too, the online map that you guys see is just the way of visualizing that information. But really if you look down deep, it's really just a spreadsheet. And that spreadsheet has to be created by somebody, right? And that somebody's me in this case. So I'm creating a lot of feature layers that can be used and brought into other projects. So if someone has more of a uh let's just say you're working for a disaster relief group, right? and uh or even even an official group, right? You're like the Red Cross or something and you use ArcGIS in your disaster management system. Well, what that agency can do is if they have ArcGIS access, which most most of them do, you can just add my layers in and it will automatically update on their own internal maps. So, there's no telling where this data goes. As far as I know, the ArcJS uh system doesn't really have a way of uh telling who's using my layers. So, I don't have any analytics at all on any of this stuff. Uh, the only thing that I can see is how many people click on the SIP cop map. That's really it. It's just a total it's just a view counter. Uh, but other than that, I can't really see where this data is going. So, something to be mindful of, which I'll talk about in a moment. But yeah, all of this data is available for anyone who needs to use it, the raw data that is. And since it's available as a feature layer on ArcGIS online, this means that a lot of third-party tools, uh, a lot of thirdparty software packages that can pull from ArcGIS now have access to that data. So, I'm going to have to be a little bit vague on this for now because I'm aware of a few software packages that are still in development that are going to be able to pull from ArcJS online. And yeah, that'll be very, very helpful in the future. But, but for now, it's still kind of developmental. The bottom line is that even though this is underwhelming, you know, you're creating layers, so what, right? Well, it's going to be helpful later on. You would be really, really surprised to find out how hard it is to have a mapping solution where I can put a dot on a map and put a label on that dot and then share it with the world. That is really incredibly hard to do. So, so hard that uh there really aren't that many commercial solutions for it. And the ones that do exist, they don't fulfill all the requirements that we may need for say the backup data or you know uploading images or providing the sourcing for a report or something like that. This whole ArcGIS ecosystem, despite how infuriating it is, despite all the downsides, the ArcJIS ecosystem is still the best way I found for visualizing stuff like this in a more complicated way uh than than you might think. So those are the four main lines of effort that I'm working on right now. Let's go through and very briefly show you an example of what all four of these uh things look like from the end user's perspective. All right, so starting off with the common intelligence picture. This is of course the main uh bread and butter of this whole project. This is the main map that I'm using for most things. Many of you have been playing with this on your own and know how things work, but there are also a lot of features that are not entirely obvious at at face value. So, one of the first things is when you load this map in, you will see it probably zoomed in to to my view. Whenever I am working on the map and I save the map uh after loading something in or changing something, it will save it at the view that I looked at. So, for instance, today I'm I'm working on the uh wildfires in New Jersey. As you can see here, it's zoomed into New Jersey and I also have turned on a couple of layers that that might not be helpful for you. You can change that on your end, however. So, uh, for instance, let's just say you're not interested in New Jersey. You're you're trying to track some other crisis or you're looking around the around the United States or even around the world and the map gets a little bit busy. As you can see here, I have wildfire uh detection services turned on. Uh, and let's just say you don't want that. Well, you can turn that off very easily. Just go over to the layers tab, go into base data here, fire data, and you can turn it all off. Uh this is something you can do on your end. It's easy. Uh you could even turn on various things. So say you don't want the modus data, the the automatic satellite fire detection stuff and you just want the pucks from the national u wildfire agencies that plug into this. Well, here are just the wildfires, right? And if you don't want any of that, you can turn it all off. So something helpful for those of you who just want to visualize certain kinds of data. Another thing that's not entirely obvious is that these icons here, at least uh the icons that I load on on my layers, uh these are clickable. So you can actually click these layers and you will find a lot of data. So let's just say for instance, we click this icon here. We can see that it is indeed a vandalism uh incident. This is one of the Tesla attacks I suppose. And it's got the street address, the attack motive. So again, it's showing you the data that I am loading in on my end. And you can actually have clickable links to the sources for this information. So again, this is uh some of the raw uh data that you will see uh from your end. Not a lot of places do that. Not a lot of places want to share their sources and and I understand why, but if we're going to have a more holistic data driven approach, you know, we've got to have things like clickable links so that people can actually see that we're not making things up, right? And you know, we've got uh stuff like this which is very very helpful I think. So another thing that might not be very obvious, especially on mobile devices. So if you're using a smartphone to view this map, you can, but it it's not obvious that you can do this. You can select different layers and then apply filters. So for instance, I've got everything turned off here uh except for the kinetic activity tracker, the total database. So I've got that loaded in as a layer. Now, you can see here that I've got it loaded in multiple times to show the past seven days of activity and the past uh 30 days of activity. I just have that so that you can easily click on and off uh certain things. So, if you just want to see what happened in the past week, you can do that with just a single click. But really, I shouldn't have to do this because you can apply filters. So, let me show you what that looks like. So, all you have to do is click the layer here so that it's bolded and it will bring up generally the properties tab. Well, now you've got a bunch of tools here on the side that you can use to manipulate this data. So, let's go to filters and let's add a new filter. And let's say I want to only see uh the incidents that are arson. Let's see. I just want to look at arson events over the p over the whole database, right? So, uh I can just add a filter where attack type is arson. And look at that. Just arson attacks. So that's how you apply filters and you can actually get pretty crazy with this. Once this data set gets really really big and we start working with, you know, potentially hundreds of thousands of points on the map. Uh these filters are going to be a little bit more helpful. So let's just add a new one here. Let's go back. Let's add Okay, attack type is vandalism. Well, let's change that to let's see here. Well, vandalism is the biggest one right now. So let's just use that because I think it'll be a little bit more illustrative. And let's add another uh condition as well. So now what we're going to do is filter this map by attack attack types that are vandalism. So vandalism attacks and let's change it by date and let's say in the last let's say 8 weeks. So there we go. Uh now we're only seeing the vandalism attacks that have taken place in the past 8 weeks. So that's a pretty helpful way of of visualizing data if you're trying to do a little bit of data analysis. Now again, you can save this, but that's where RJS gets you. So, uh, they're going to they're going to want their subscription based off of that. So, um, you know, it's not going to be very very easy to do. It's going to save in your browser, but if you wanted to export that data somewhere, well, that's going to be a little bit harder to to get this data off of this map. But while you're viewing it, while you're using it, it's it's free. it's you don't even need to log in or anything. So, just something to to kind of keep in mind. One of the other things that you can do if you are so inclined is add more data. So, say uh you find somebody else who's got a better data set or something different, something you else you wanted to add. So, say like population demographics. I don't have that on my maps, but let's just say you wanted to do that. So, you can come in here and add a layer. Give it a second to populate. Uh you've got a couple of choices here. Living Atlas and ArcJS online. Living Atlas is uh the older format if I'm not mistaken. ARGS online is kind of the newer thing, but let's just see uh what we have here. Let's see. Well, we've got a couple of EZRI layers here for US Census populated place areas. Seems like a relatively new thing. It's it's authoritative and it's by EZRI. So, it's by the parent company for all of this. Well, now that's going to freeze my map, I think. But, uh, let's just zoom in here to a populated area like say Baltimore. And yeah, so there we go. We've got a a completely different layer that's now added to our map. And again, we can sort that if we so choose. So again, it should be clickable and it'll tell you the population of certain areas. So that may be helpful for you. Uh, it may be very useful over time. I don't know. Uh, but you can definitely add in other data. Now, of course, when you refresh the page, all these changes go away. So, uh it just goes back to the standard default. And that's the way this works with ARGS. If you want to save it to your own system, you're going to have to shell out for a very expensive subscription. So, again, I'm trying to make this as easy as possible for people who are just they don't want to log in. You don't want to pay for the service, but you want to have something uh to manipulate some data with. Well, you've got it with these online maps. So, let's jump over to the SIP COP dashboard, the uh dashboard product I've got going. And as you can see, it's a pretty heavy lifting product here. It takes a while to load and it it may uh stress your your computer if you're trying to run this on a laptop or something. Uh you know, good luck. I don't know. Um but it it may or may not load. But anyway, this is the dashboard product. And as you can see here, the reason that it takes so long to load is because it's loading four separate maps or however many maps that I want to put on it, uh, and all of these background projects. So, so say you don't really care about a certain area that I care about and I'm trying to track and do things, well, you could just expand it and and not worry about it so much. So, uh, the the really the world's your oyster here. You can do all kinds of stuff. Say you don't really care about my charts and data. Well, you can just drag it down and make it disappear. Uh likewise uh you can also since this is embedded in in most of the dashboards that I'm going to be using uh you can also access all of my Obsidian notes. So I think that's pretty helpful. So say you want a wire report uh you want to read the wire report in the actual map itself. You can um the default is obviously uh going to be set to the uh situation report. So, if there's some kind of situp that needs to happen, if I need to have text on screen to show a readable summary of what's going on or what's happened so far, I can do that. I know that the dashboard here, this dashboard product fills a really, really niche role. Like, most people probably are not going to use this, but it's there. Uh, I can change the default zoom level so that if we've got multiple crises going on around the planet or around the country or in an area. I don't have to constantly move around and zoom and uh, you know, save the zoom level and I don't have to do any of that. I can just zoom to a specific area. This this main one here that I've got in the upper right hand corner here, this is just a zip cop main and these other two are the same map. So, it's literally the exact same map loaded three times. I've just got to zoom to different areas. So, uh, as the default, this will change. Every crisis is different, right? So, every crisis needs different data loaded. As many of you know, during, uh, some of the aircraft crashes, I was using these two panels down here uh, for live streams. So, I can actually live stream news media coverage. If there's like a YouTube live stream or something, I can put that here on the map. I don't have to just show map data. Similar story with other data. So, I can put in charts and all kinds of data analysis tools based off of the layers of what's populating on these maps. I know it's super nerdy and it's not going to be helpful for everyone, but some situations it might be pretty helpful. And while there's, you know, no crisis going on that I need to track, you know, right now, I mean, there's always a crisis, right? But if there's some kind of major geopolitical situation going on, I can configure this dashboard to be the most helpful for someone to look at it and see what's going on. So, and finally, we have the Nexus. Uh, this is again ArcJS's primitive website builder. It's not pretty. I will admit I'll make improvements on that over time, but right now, again, we're we're working with a working product here. So, I have needed a general tip line for a very long period of time, but I have been very hesitant to implement such for a variety of reasons. So, hopefully this goes well. Okay. So, if you have something to send to me, you can use this general tip line. I'll just walk through it right quick. You click the tab, it opens up in a new tab. You can do this, of course, all on your phone. It's a little bit buggy on phones right now, but I'm I'm working on it. So, just just give me a minute. Uh it's it's going to take a little bit to uh get things kind of ironed out. But here's what it looks like on the internet, right, on a web browser. And you can see it's a pretty simple thing. You can just put uh the date and time something happens. You'd be surprised uh the the number of people who do not uh know what to report. They will a lot of people and and they're good naturatured. They're they're very well-meaning. But a lot of times, I would say 95% of the time when somebody gives me a tip about something or they send something to me, I can't do anything with it because usually there's critical data missing. Date and time, that's the basics, right? When did this occur? Um, that's a very, very critical step. Another critical step is the location. And as you can see here, I have a map actually embedded in the survey here. So, you can do one of two things. uh you can either uh click the map and it will try to suck your GPS coordinate in. But for the data uh conscious, you don't have to worry about that. Uh for for the people who don't want me to know where you're at or where the location the incident is taking place, uh don't worry about it. You don't need to to do that. You can just click the map. So you just click it. Random spot in Missouri. There you go. Uh and that will give me the lat and long of where the incident takes place. The reason that I have this location data enabled is for people who are say on the street, they witness something they and they don't know where they are. Uh but they can tap the map to get their current location right. So it's not necessary. I don't want to know where uh people are sending reports from. I I just really just need to know the incident where the incident is taking place. Uh because you'd be surprised how long it takes me to figure out where something is taking place. So again, don't worry about it too much if you you share as much data as you want. The the data is just coming to me. So obviously, if you're just sending me a link of something you saw on Twitter, please do not use your own location. I don't want to know where your couch is sitting in your living room. I don't care. Uh and I should not have that information anyway. But again, the location of where the incident is taking place is critical. Uh because well, I just need to know where things happen. Otherwise, I can't put it on the map, right? Likewise, I need to know if this is legit. So, if somebody sees something or there's some kind of uh crisis or something and there's no evidence of it or there's no like amplifying information, I can't do much with it. So, I have a spot here to upload media. There is a file size limit, so please don't drop a 12-hour documentary to me. But, yeah, we'll see how we'll see how much abuse that gets. I may have to shut that down pretty quickly. Who knows? And then also contact information. Notice that it is not required. You can submit this totally anonymously. Uh yeah, I don't care. Anons run the internet, right? So if you want to put your email address, a burner email address is perfectly fine. I don't care. It would just be really nice if you're submitting something that you know is not going to get a lot of media coverage and you like have firsthand information of something. It would be really helpful to have your contact information so I can reach out if necessary to get some more amplifying information. Uh because again I fully expect all of these reports to be abused quite thoroughly by malign actors, by spammers, you name it, right? So I fully expect a lot of false information to to be put into these forms. So I'm going to have to filter this quite a bit on my end. But coming back to the other forms, you can go and check them out on your own. Really, you can kind of see where I'm going with this. I'm frontloading effort. I don't expect hardly anyone to go to the grocery store and tell me when they don't have a can of beans on the shelf. But if there are major logistical shortages, again, like during the COVID years, I have a survey. I have a report format already there. So again, if we just open up the logistical shortages one, it's different. It's these are not all the same uh form uh that I need different information. So again, the date of when something occurs, the store name, and the good experiencing shortage. You can even scan uh barcodes with this. I don't know how well that feature is going to work. I guess we'll see. But either way, all of these reports are different. Same thing if you're a SIG nerd. Um we're trying to get ahead of the game with regards to things like jamming and signals interference. As we all know from the Ukrainian war, signals are important and it's going to be a little bit more of a problem as time goes on. For instance, even with my own ghost net, my own highfrequency radio network, I've experienced deliberate jamming. We don't necessarily have to wait for the war in Ukraine to kind of come to our modern society for these things to start existing already. So again, this is just a standard sort of military like uh signals intelligence interference report, right? And of course, it's very very different. It's it's just something that might be helpful. Of course, this is not linked to the FCC in any way. I'm just some guy on the internet, so this is just helping me out to figure out uh where jamming incidents are occurring. I don't think this is going to get too much use, but who knows if you I would assume that most of these is going to come from Ghostnet users who uh want to tell me that they got jammed during the net. So that was that's probably my guess as to where most of this use is going to come from. But again, there are plenty of others. This one, for instance, the report a drone sighting. This is solely in response to the New Jersey drone crisis from a while back. As you remember, nobody really set up a succinct, you know, processed master database for all of the drone reports. It's just people who were plotting what they saw on Twitter. There was no one place for people to report a drone sighting to people like me who were going to plot it on a map. Right? So again, if we have another hysterical case of drone sightings going on around the country, well, look, I've already got the form for that. So again, that's kind of the way things stand for now. Uh also on this Nexus tab, you can see some of the other products. You can click uh clickable links for the different different maps. I've got YouTube tutorials. My ghost notes are here as well. So again, it's just kind of a central hub, a nexus, right, for a lot of the data that I'm using geospatial products for. So I know that that is a lot of information to take in at the moment. It's it's quite a lot to to kind of start implementing now. But if you'll just give me a few more moments, let's cover the issues and improvements. So as you might imagine, there are some significant downsides to this whole line of effort that I'm doing. And one of the major problems with this is decentralization, or rather the lack of it. This is purely a centralized effort. All of the report formats, if you were to submit something, it's just going to come to me. Literally nobody else. Just me. All of the mapping stuff, all of these data layers, all of these online maps, it's all being managed by just me, right? And being a single point of failure is not good uh to me. I I don't like that. Now, of course, this is my work, right? So, it's going to have to have a level of single point of failure for now, but once it starts getting into more widespread use, I hope that this data at least can be used by other people. Of course, security concerns are very real uh these days. So, you know, if something happens to me, uh this whole project is going to die on the vine because not really anybody else can contribute to it. Nobody else can manage these things. Now, the data will hopefully be there as long as my account's there. But again, it's a single point of failure, and I don't like that. So, I would much rather have the ability for someone to, you know, ever so often do a pull uh pull all of my data and store it locally if they want to use it so they can build on it later on. ArcJS makes this relatively easy if you're in their ecosystem, but it's very expensive. It's not free. It's not it's not easy uh either to get involved with ARJS's ecosystem. So, you know, it's a hard thing to do. So, something I'm going to be working on in due time. I don't know how effective it's going to be, but I'm going to try to make this a little bit more decentralized because I just don't like being a single point of failure. Sort of along the same lines are the end user considerations. Again, this data is not very easy to use sometimes if you want to just use the raw data. So, I know that it is not uh the easiest thing to work with in the world and that is a problem. Now, ArcGIS, Ezri, really the parent company has made progress by leaps and bounds over the past few years to make GIS something that normal human beings can understand to some degree. Of course, that's a very loaded statement because this is some of the most complex stuff you could possibly do. Uh, it's not easy to do. There are whole professions, whole careers built around people understanding GIS. It's one of those things that if you understand it, you can potentially make a lot of money at it. But not a lot of people want to go through the effort of spending years and years and years of their life learning how to use this one software program. So either way, for the end user, that just means that it's hard to use, and that that's not good. So I'm working on making it a little bit easier for people who want to use this data, and they don't have to go through the mumbo jumbo of working through some of these really complicated ways of visualizing this data like I have to do on my end. sort of in the same vein as symbology. I know that the symbols are very confusing sometimes on the map. You may be wondering why am I using the certain symbols that I'm using. Well, for those of you who look at this map and don't understand what these symbols are. These are military standard 2525 symbols. So, these are a military format. And the reason that I'm using that is because it's a common standard. the entirety of NATO, most of the world uh uses this symbology in a more of a in more of a wartime setting for wartime mapping, uh things like that. I have found that it is the best way of using symbology on a map. Even though it's not very intuitive, I think it's the best way of visualizing this type of data on a map. If I were to start mapping say logistical problems and things like that, I'll use different symbols. But for say the kinetic activity tracker uh that data layer that that feature class there are symbols for all of these things. So I think using a common format is probably the way to go. Not only because it's a common format and my own symbols probably won't mean very much. They mean something to me but they may not mean something to you. Not only because of that but also because it's probably a very good idea to start learning what these symbols are. For instance the two I have here on the screen the blue rectangle. You know, blue rectangles are a friendly unit. Red diamonds are a an enemy unit or an adversary unit. So, in this case, you're looking at a friendly helicopter landing zone or HLZ. And uh the enemy one is an enemy light infantry unit. So, again, all of these things mean something. It's going to take time to learn what they are. But I think that by putting them in my mapping products, it will be helpful for the general public or the the more prepared public, right? The more the more informed citizen, right, to start understanding what these symbols are as best we can, right? I think it'll be very helpful in the future. So that's what I'm I'm doing with that. But again, when it comes to the enduser considerations, bringing this data in is going to be very helpful. Using it offline is going to be helpful. I know these are off these are online maps right now, right? How how helpful is that in the field? Well, it's not. Now, this was very helpful during the Los Angeles wildfires uh few weeks ago, couple months ago now. And because cellular traffic did not go down, so you've got this crisis where people need to know where to go. They need to know where the fire is located and a live updating map if you have cell service is really, really great. Now, obviously, if you don't have cell service, it's useless. But we're working on it. I'm working on offline uh ways of of manipulating and storing this data. So, one of the main ways that we can do this is by integrating with other products. And one of the bigger ones that I'm sure many of you are asking about is ATAC. Can my data be integrated into ATAC? The answer is yes and no. In classic fashion, many of you may not be aware, but there is an ATAC plugin for ArcGIS, but it's not available to the public. It's only available to the government. So, if you are a government user of ATAC, yeah, it's easy. You just add the plugin and you can pull in my data layers and see everything that I have put on the map on a tech. Really handy. But for the rest of us plebs and taxpayers, it's not possible. Uh at least not with that plugin. What you have to do is a lot of workaround. You have to export this data uh from the you have to export each layer. It's not easy. I can tell you it's not. It's possible, but it's not easy. So I think that the workaround for now is for me to generate if something goes down for me to generate KMZs that you can download and integrate into ATAC. That's just a a file format that's that's more readily common. It's usable with Google Earth and ATAC. And I think that's probably how I'm going to do it. But give me some time. I I got to work on this a little bit more because right now there's no real one-click way of integrating this data into ATAC that's easy for people to do on their end. Um it's possible. There's workarounds. It's just not easy. So, give me some time on that. Another thing I'm working on is automation. I'm trying to streamline the process to make things a little bit easier for me to do on my end. Now, this is a touchy subject because, well, I want to automate things to make things as easier for me and for you as possible, but at the same time, I don't want to just be a simple aggregator of data. And what I mean by that is you may not you're you're not going to see it on your end, but on my end, say these drone reports, say you go in and you file a drone report and you give me the location, you give me all the data that I need, and you click submit. Okay, cool. Well, on my end, I have the ability to turn on a layer which allows that survey response, that report response to autopop populate on the map without me checking it at all. You know, I can do that. Uh, but you guys might understand how that's a little bit dangerous to be doing. So, I don't want to do that so much. So really when you click submit it just comes into my dashboard and I have to go through and manually look at each specific report, figure out what it means and then generate my own puck on the map if I think that it is worthy of putting on the map. You can see how this brings in a lot of subjectivity, right? So now we're starting to add a person in between the raw data and what's displayed to the public. Again, this is 2025. Working on the internet is just not possible without doing that to some degree if you want to have a quality product. So there's going to have to be some interpretation. One of the things that you know may be a problem is say you've got a let's just take the drone example for instance. Somebody a drone flies over Newark again and I've got 200 reports of the same exact drone. Well, does that mean that I have 200 drones? No. It means that I have one drone that was seen by 200 people that filed 200 reports. We don't need 200 pucks on the map. Again, a lot of these uh things are going to have to be interpreted by a person. They're going to have to be processed by a person, in this case me, and that's going to bring in subjectivity. A lot of you are going to submit things that I don't think is worth putting on the map or it doesn't really fit with what I'm trying to do with the map. And, you know, people might get upset about that. A lot of people are going to post spam or fake information and I'm going to have to go through and verify all of this stuff, right? Just because somebody reports something doesn't mean it's true. So, there's going to have to be a lot of background work on my end. These report formats are just to make it easier on me. Uh so I don't have to ask questions. I don't have to go back and forth and I don't have to spend hours digging uh because somebody just sent me a tweet or retweet or tagged me in something on Twitter with no context, right? But again, there's always this battle between automation of the raw data to help me out and also trying to reduce the subjectivity on my end, but also keep a lot of subjectivity in there so that you're getting a quality product. Because I tell you, if I just open this up to the internet, well, one, that's that's a very bad idea. But if I were to allow all of the reports to just autopop populate on the map like I can do, you know, you're not going to get uh the best information. So, there's going to be a lot of processing that goes on on my end that is is going to be again a single point of failure until I figure out a better solution. And all of that just kind of leads to what this whole thing is about. I know I've talked a long time today about this, but really I'm just trying to convey to you what I am trying to frontload and what I'm trying to work on for later. Most of this stuff is not going to be helpful now. I honestly don't know if it will ever be helpful. I'm hoping that it will be, but right now I'm just getting the effort, the work, the templates, all this stuff done on my end so that when a crisis happens around the world, we can easily display the data that is helpful for people in need. That's really what this whole thing is about, to streamline this process, make it easy, because I tell you, you know, trying to go through an ARJIS tutorial that's 4 hours long during the middle of a a minute-by-minute crisis, that's not the time for that sort of thing. If I have a bug or I have to have a problem within this on my end with regards to my learning of ArcGIS, the time to learn is now, right? Similar situation for you guys on your end. The time to learn how to use these mapping tools is now, not during a crisis. Because I can tell you if I were to, you know, just say, you know, Xe event occurs, go in there for all of you, hop into the Nexus and start pushing me information if you've got it. Nobody would know what that means without this video to explain, right? If I were to say, hey, look, dashboard is up. I've got the SIP cop updated as well. Nobody knows what that means unless I've explained it beforehand. So really, this is just kind of a front-loading of the effort so that if something important happens around the planet, we can more easily understand what's going on and it's kind of, you know, bringing bringing the team together, right? So hopefully this has been helpful for many of you. I know this is very longwinded way to talk about online maps. Can you think of anything more boring? I I know, right? It's it's not the most entertaining stuff, but this is the kind of thing that wins wars and saves lives. Uh I know that it it may not seem like it, but it does. Now, of course, we don't want to say this is the best thing since sliced bread, right? But this is some of the more boring things that we have to work through that are going to build the infrastructure for uh cooler stuff later on. Many of you can probably read between the lines on some of the stuff I've said today and some of the stuff I've covered and you can maybe uh see where I'm going about, you know, ways of of using this information in the future, other things we can bring in, other ways of automating things. So, I I'll leave that for a future update. But for now, this is the way things stand and it is, I think, a pretty good start. So, thank you all of you who have stuck with me through this and I'm really excited to see where this goes. I really do appreciate it. And again, a special thank you to all of you on Patreon who have supported me through this uh endeavor and getting this thing going. I I know that it's uh not the most entertaining thing sometimes, but I really do appreciate this because in due time, this is going to be uh one piece of the puzzle that is going to help out some of the other projects we're working on. Right? As you can see, maybe we can tie in a lot of the stuff we've already built. Maybe tie in the ghost net a little bit more. You see where we're kind of going with this? All of it will become a little bit more clear in due time as as we can get more organized and and get some of this uh uh workload out the door. So, I would not have been able to do this at all without your support on Patreon. So, thank you so much for that. So, that's all I have for today. I know I've talked way too long already, but thank you guys all again for watching, and I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.