This paper highlights experiences developing an ArcStorm parcel management system. Managing parcels in an ArcStorm environment holds many advantages over ArcInfo's Librarian system. Concurrent transaction management and feature locking show great potential but bad performance becomes an issue when managing a large, multi-feature parcel database. Improvements in performance will go a long way in moving ArcStorm forward to being a truly functional transaction management and storage facility for spatial data. Described in this paper you will find the results of numerous benchmarks that show how dual or multi-CPU processors may help. As well as you will find tips that may help in the development of your own ArcStorm Parcel Management system.
Since its inception in 1988, the City of Las Vegas' GIS group has been involved in the creation of an urban parcel-based GIS. We have digitized, received data from other entities, received data from outside engineering firms and have provided same to other entities and outside engineering. Our maps/profiles have been used by FBI, BLM, various Federal Government Agencies, local and state public safety agencies as well as other CLV Departments, and outside (paying) customers. We feel that a thorough discussion of how we 1) receive and process base data (County Assessor Parcels), 2) update and maintain our own datasets built from this base data ("detail" files and librarian functions), and 3) the production of maps/plots on demand for customers of this data ("plot-gen" and "kathy") would be very useful to many of the ArcInfo users who are following along behind us on similar projects. During the 8 years since the City of Las Vegas first embarked on it's GIS program, we went from a Prime mini-computer to Sun SPARCstations, and from 56,024 parcels to 181,000+ parcels. We have written several AML's to help automate the process of receiving data from the County Assessor, to build additional layers of data specific to the City from this base (parcel) layer, the use of Librarian to perform additional QC on all the data (assessor as well) and a couple of rather sophisticated AML's to produce plotfiles of desired areas with requested layers in a mostly automated procedure. While many of the other urban users are at least as sophisticated, if not more so, we believe that our unique collection of GIS users in the Las Vegas Valley, together with a single point of creation for the parcel (base) layer provides us many opportunities to give insight to others in similar situations.
As local governments grapple with tough decisions about land records, they seek answers about the modernization process and the value of modernization efforts. To help address these issues, we have designed and administered a multiple-state series of surveys studying the modernization process. These surveys are designed to determine the factors of modernization in the process, and the outcomes of the process. Specifically, we will present a "snapshot" and comparison of local government investments and efforts in GIS/LIS in the states of Ohio and Wisconsin. In addition, we will present a series of factors which have been found to promote and/or inhibit modernization at different stages of progress. Finally, we will discuss our research aimed at assisting in the identification of the benefits of modernization. Specifically, we are working to identify benefits of three distinct types: efficiency, effectiveness, and equity. We will discuss the status of our efforts towards the identification and measurement of these outcomes.