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Track: Local/State Government, Cadastral, Land Records
Richard E. Klosterman
University of Akron
Akron, OH 44325-5005
Telephone: 330-972-8037
Fax: 330-972-6080
E-mail: Klosterman@UAkron.edu
The What If? Collaborative Planning Support System
Defining Issue: The increasing capability of GIS allows it to support an increasingly larger number of applications but has made it less appropriate for particular applications such as planning and less accessible to elected officials and the general public. GIS Solution: This paper describes a new GIS-based planning support system that combines GIS's traditional spatial analysis and display capabilities with custom-written routines that support collaborative processes of community planning, design, and evaluation. Methodology: What if? is an interactive GIS-based planning support system that supports all aspects of the planning process: conducting a land suitability analysis, projecting future land use demand, preparing a land use plan, allocating demand to suitable locations, and evaluating the likely impacts of alternative policy choices and assumptions. The system allows users quickly and easily to create alternative development scenarios and determine the likely impacts on future land use patterns
and associated population and employment trends. The package is easy to use, customized to the user's database and policy issues, and provides outputs in a variety of easy-to-understand maps, charts, and tables. Software: What if? has been written with MapObjects and Visual Basic. MapObjects is used to provide the system's map display capability; the interface, computational routines, and other display functions are prepared with Visual Basic.
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