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Abstract


Paper
Cost Effective Solutions to Utilizing GIS with Existing Municipal Databases
Track: State and Local Government
Author(s): Andrew Sauer

GIS can be an expensive, intimidating endeavor for smaller cities (population less than 25,000). With proper planning and technical resources, however, a smaller municipality can effectively use GIS to display existing data, generate new maps, and increase data retrieval capabilities without spending large amounts of money. Prairie Village, Kansas, a Kansas City suburb, was faced with this very issue and contracted with Camp Dresser & McKee (CDM) to provide professional GIS services for its Public Works Department. A community of more than 23,000 people, Prairie Village desired the ability to link existing public works data to available county GIS coverages. Working with a small budget, CDM was able to successfully link the existing nonspatial public works data with the county spatial coverages using ArcView. CDM used addresses stored in the existing public works database as the conduit to link spatial and nonspatial data. Using geocoding, the location of each database feature was located on the county GIS coverage. The first step in the project was to create a relationship between the street segments in the City's database with the county street centerline coverage. Once the initial street database was connected to the centerline coverage, additional data stored in the nonspatial database could be displayed spatially-including street signs, trees, and sidewalks. The resulting connection established between the existing public works database and the county's spatial database provided the City with a method for displaying existing data, generating new maps, and efficiently querying and retrieving data. The Public Works Department can now effectively utilize, update, and maintain data in ArcView.

Andrew Sauer
Camp Dresser & McKee Inc.
9200 Ward Parkway
Suite 500
Kansas City , MO 64114
USA
Phone: (816) 444-8270
Fax: (816) 444-8232
E-mail: saueran@cdm.com