Figure 1
How can I make our GIS data available to all city employees over our intranet? Will it be easy enough for even the mayor and council members to use without any training?
Find out how some cities are providing online GIS data and interactive applications to their entire workforce over their intranet. Learn how they are publishing tiled high-resolution imagery, detailed parcel data, and other city data to end-users who can view, search, analyze, and even create scale plots, all within the confines of a web browser.
With the costs of GIS hardware and software continuing to plunge, the capabilites once reserved for high-end systems are now done quickly and easily on the desktop. Much of this functionality is within reach of the casual user, and many desktop machines can routinely store and work with many gigabytes of data at a time. Nonetheless, Information Technology managers in city governements are still finding it quite a challenge to deploy GIS techology to the masses in city government. Although much of the technology is becoming easier to use, it still isn't simple enough for the casual user to launch the software, get answers, and quit. This type of user may only use the software ten minutes a day; he has no intention of ever becoming a GIS professional.
The Internet has brought about very exciting technology to run GIS software as a service to many web browser-enabled clients virtually overnight. Most municipal governments are doing business over the Internet, but more importantly they are capitalizing on Internet technology to do business within the organization through internal Internets or "Intranets". Three Southern California cities are highlighted here. They are all using an off-the-shelf product for their Intranet GIS, and each has some slight variations in how they use the software and which city departments are driving its use.
Mission Viejo
The City of Mission Viejo's Engineering Department purchased 6-inch-pixel aerial photography and needed a simple software solution to distribute this data out to all city departments. The initial solution was to place the imagery on a shared network drive, thus allowing any user on the city network to access the individual TIF images. The process of determining which of the 117 images covered the desired location was left up to the user. Files are about 40GB each, so if a user were interested in a location at a corner and four files were required, 160MB was transferred across the network. Mission Viejo selected CityGIS to serve up the imagery and many other map layers. This allows users to focus on an area and see imagery without having to know which files to obtain. This solution is web-based, so the files that are moving across the network are only about 150KB. (See Figure 1)
Figure 1
Mission Viejo uses the Property Map module to look up ownership information and generate ownership mailing lists, view general plan land use and zoning, and see demographic trends.
Brea
The City of Brea is in the Northeast corner of Orange County, California. It has a population of 34,000 and a daytime population of 100,000. It is comprised of 11.1 square miles, with an additional 7.5 of oil fields to be annexed. The Development Services Department has being using GIS to track property in the city. The Deparment is a one-stop shop for Building and Safety, Planning, Engineering, and Code Enforcement. As such, there are a number of basic GIS applications spanning various parts of the Department. Many such applications are currently being done through CityGIS. Currently, CityGIS is being linked to a permitting solution from Pentamation. This will allow any city user to find properties graphically or by address, parcel number, or owner and view and enter permits for that property.
Dana Point
The City of Dana Point, along the southern Orange County California coast, is home to many seaside residences and condominiums. Although the city is largely built out, there remains a great deal of construction particularly along the coastline. As such, Dana Point keeps track of a multitude of construction permits, coastal development permits, zoning variances, and other documents. The City had historical records in a database but had no geographic link. This database is now linked to CityGIS so anyone within the City can look up a document by locating the property by address, parcel number, or owner.
Figure 2
The City has many condominiums, where there is a one-to-many relationship between the parcel graphics and the property ownership records. Besides having these records included in the 300-foot buffer to do a legal owner notification, the records are accessible as "Additional Records" in CityGIS. (See Figure 2, 3) The condo records appear in a popup window, hyperlinked to a popup full property report. (See Figure 4)
Figure 3
Figure 4
Conclusion
The primary goal for each city is to make GIS data easily accessible by anyone. In each city, GIS began as a collection of data and software installed on a single machine or small number of machines. Each was faced with the dilemma of how to get data out to the masses.
Each city uses CityGIS becuase it was originally designed with the help of several small cities. Input from such cities drove the design of the product to make it something that the mayor and city manager can use, even without any training. It has a limited number of buttons and while it doesn't do everything the popular desktop GIS software packages do, that is by design. Each of the cities reconizes that about 80% of the users have very simple needs, and only have to see the GIS data and run simple queries, reports, and scale map prints. CityGIS does all of this. The other 20% may have more advanced needs, and while CityGIS could have been designed to do more, it would have detracted from the simplicity that makes the other 80% of the users so successful. In each of the three cities highlighted, CityGIS does not replace desktop GIS sofware, but complements it by allowing the small handful of GIS professionals to rapidly deploy data to everyone in their city.