In August, 1994 the Department began an experiment with making GIS available on the desktop of Planners and other front line staff people in order to integrate GIS technology with daily operations. The Department also made the technology available to the public in a limited way. While this would have been an ideal ARCVIEW application, and was originally envisioned as such, there was no clear indication that ARCVIEW would be available on our platform within a year. In the interim, the GIS staff for the Department built an easy to use, comprehensive GIS viewing tool using AML to get this experiment up and running. This paper will look at the Viewer application and the functionality it delivers to the desktop, how GIS is being used and the impact that it has had on daily operations, and the direction for future development.
Between 1989 and 1993, the last of our production datasets were translated from a Synercom database to ArcInfo. New GIS layers, such as Zoning Districts and Annexations, were developed in ArcInfo. Production of 1" to 200' grid maps of Zoning Districts and staff maps for Zoning case review were converted from a manual process to the GIS in 1995. A major project to enter point address information in City lots, coupled with work to clean up the base map line work will allow the development of an intelligent lot polygon database in the near future.
A menu-driven GIS viewer was developed, which allows non-technical users to access information based on address or Austin Grid and display as many as 50 layers of information. The experiment was initiated to see if making the City's GIS resources more readily available to staff and the public would improve customer service and result in better, more timely decision-making. The tool was originally conceived as a ARCVIEW application, but ARCVIEW was not available on our hardware platform in 1994.
When this experiment began, the primary users of the Viewer had little or no experience with computers, except with word processing using character-based terminals. Most had no experience using a mouse. Hour long training sessions were conducted for small groups of users as X-terminals or PC's were deployed in their sections. Follow-up sessions were conducted whenever necessary. At the present time, perhaps 6-7 end users have become very proficient and regular users of the system, with another 25 casual users. Many of the casual users would use the system more often if we had more licensed seats available. Because of license limitations, it is difficult for more than six Viewer users to get on the system at any one time. Other potential users in the Department do not currently have access to either an X-terminal or a PC.
Prior to developing the Viewer, the GIS staff had created a number of applications for viewing GIS data and doing basic queries. These tended to be very limited in scope and were either demonstrations of GIS capabilities rather than true GIS applications or very narrowly focused viewing tools. The Viewer was intended to replace all of these and provide an extensible framework for future development. Within the limits of AML, the Viewer was designed using a more object-oriented approach, with particular emphasis on reusability of code and encapsulation. Other customized versions of the Viewer share most of the same code. New themes and programs can be added to the permanent code fairly easily. As new coverages are developed or become available from other departments, they are routinely added to the Viewer. The Viewer can also be easily packaged with other applications. Future enhancements, if warranted, will incorporate more object-oriented features and be more easily extensible.
Users can access and display up to 45 layers of geographic information (See Figure 1 ). This list has been growing since the first version came on line. Screen displays and printed maps show only those features that the user selects. While most of the geographic datasets were developed in-house, some of the data was obtained from other departments and agencies. Users also have the ability to define up to five additional coverages or library layers to display and use for map creation. This feature is most useful for our map production staff, allowing them to create quick plots for special projects.
Figure 1: Theme Choice Menu
Users can also identify features in many of these coverages, simply by selecting from the menu. More advanced users can make queries at the command line.
Figure 2: Analytical Options Menu
Users have the ability to create maps from their screen display and print them on
Postscript output devices or FAX them directly to customers. These maps are often used
as supporting documentation for decision-making, answering questions such as, is a
subject tract in or out of the flood plain or does a proposed building block a protected
view of the State Capitol building. Currently, the Department does not charge customers
for this service.
Users also have the ability to create large color plots from their screen display at the touch of a button. The user can specify their own titles, fonts, font size, map scale, and page size for these customized plots (See Figure 3: Custom Plot Parameter Menu). This feature allows our mapping staff and end users to create quick plots for internal customers on tight deadlines without expending alot of resources.
Users can run several analytical programs from the menu: one creates a Geographic profile for a property when the user outlines a polygon around a feature on the display. This profile creates a report by drilling down through the available layers and compiling the retrieved information in a readable format (See Figure 4). The report is displayed in a popup window and the user can print the file to one of several printers. Another program checks the City Limit coverage and the annexation coverage to see when a defined property became part of the City's 5 mile extra-territorial jurisdiction. This grandfather date determines what set of development regulations the property needs to conform to.
Figure 4: Geographic Profile Report
Users have the ability to define a default view by defining one or more coverages to display by default when they start up the system. This is accomplished by pressing a button on the Theme Choice Menu (see Figure 1 above).
Unlike ARCVIEW, a user can not define multiple projects or multiple views within a project. The application also displays the default view when started (although the user needs to specify the geography first). This can be an annoyance for some users, especially those who need to view different data sets every time they are working in the Viewer.
A customized version of the Viewer is being used by our Address Section to help them with assigning addresses, answering addressing questions, and correcting address problems. Most of the customizations involved limiting the choice of themes, adding some specialized query functions, and providing alternative display routines for certain themes. Most of these kinds of customizations can be made simply by creating a new main menu, a rather trivial task. Most of the programs that run these applications are shared, making maintenance of the application easier.
Departmental Staff are generating relatively sophisticated reports and maps to satisfy public and customer information requests on demand, without the intervention of technical support staff. This represents a dramatic leap forward in customer service delivery. Gathering the information that is collected on the geographic profile report would have taken days or weeks in the past. Some of the information would not have been available at all.
Maps of specific customer sites would not have been generated in the past, except in very special circumstances, and usually not for distribution to the customer. Now they are plotted and faxed to customers daily. The Viewer's custom plotting option also gives staff the ability to generate special plots for City Council, Planning Commission and other presentations, again with little or no intervention from technical support staff.
End users usually need to query the system when a customer is in their office or on the phone. Their need tends to be immediate (or is seen to be immediate). Because of this, viewer users prefer to stay connected to the system, whether they are using it or not. The time it takes to log on to the system and start ArcInfo are perceived to be unacceptable. They also fear that they will not be able to access the system, because there are a limited number of seats. As a result, they use up valuable seats. To help alleviate this problem, our Base Mapping Coordinator usually disconnects viewer users every morning. We have also installed a HITMAN program, but some of the users have figured out how to circumvent it.
We are currently upgrading our main system from VMS to UNIX and adding a large server. This should alleviate some of our current problems. Because it is not an affordable option to make more ArcInfo seats available, the Viewer is still considered a transitional application.
The client-server approach represented by ARCVIEW is clearly a more effective and affordable approach for the long-term. We recently purchased five ARCVIEW licenses for Windows and are allowing a small number of users to experiment with it. These experiments will give us a better idea of what level of customization will be necessary to support our less technical users and they will also give us an idea of what kind of differences in response time and user acceptance we can expect (if any).
On the positive side, the Viewer has shown the skeptics in the Department (and there were more than a few) that GIS is a viable technology and we have demonstrated conclusively that GIS can contribute to the efficient functioning of the Department and improved customer service. We have also proven that planners and managers have a large appetite for digital spatial information, appropriately packaged. A number of users in the Department now assert that they can not do their job if they are not connected to the GIS. As more sections in the Department and in other departments hear about the system, the demand for it grows.
Applications, such as the Land Status query, save users time and provide more accurate information than was available previously. The ability to access flood plain and contour information or zoning and building outlines on the desktop for a particular property, even at moderate speeds, saves time compared to manual lookup, which usually can not be done in the planner's office. Many of the datasets available in the Viewer were simply not available in paper copies at scales that would allow research on specific properties. The ability to print the results of spatial queries and get them to the customer is something that could not be done previously. Putting GIS on the desktop has also increased feedback on database quality and has led to correction of errors in our data.
A significant amount of resources have been expended on developing and enhancing the Viewer. While a reasonable case could have been made to wait for ARCVIEW and devote those resources to other necessary GIS tasks, an opportunity would have been lost. By capitalizing on that opportunity, the profile of the entire GIS program has been raised and GIS has been demonstrated to be an invaluable tool for project review and customer service. In addition, because our Department will be an ArcInfo site for the foreseeable future, there will continue to be a need for a comprehensive viewing and quick plotting routine in that environment. Finally, we have learned valuable lessons about application design that will help us design better applications in either AML or Avenue.
