Sharing the wealth: Taking GIS data to the public
While the debate continues about which types of GIS data should be made available to the public, for what purpose and at what price, many local governments have already taken the lead and are busy solving the “how” of publishing and distributing digital map data.
Now that many cities and counties have completed the development stage of a GIS, maximizing the use and value of that data by making it available to a wider circle of users is the next logical step.
Many municipalities are looking at simply sharing the data in an easy-to-use and readily accessible format with other municipal offices. For other local governments, distribution to the public is an objective as well.
The common denominator seems to be an interest in being able to easily mass-distribute map data primarily for flexible viewing purposes. In just the past couple of years, a number of factors have come together making the environment suitable for increased digital access to GIS data. For example, a tremendous amount of GIS data has been converted, while use of PCs and graphical user interfaces (GUI) is widespread.
Two major players in the GIS world recently underscored this trend. ESRI, Redlands, Calif., and Huntsville, Ala.-based Intergraph, have both presented market share models depicting the impact that users who are simply referencing rather than using the data for higher level analysis purposes are expected to have on the GIS industry. And, although the companies’ models vary, both concur that the number of people who desire or require access to digital map data is increasing dramatically.
Particularly over the last year, a number of desktop GIS and map viewer products and services have hit the market. ESRI’s ArcView, MapInfo and Atlas GIS are among the desktop GIS products that often require considerable GIS expertise and customization. There are also viewers such as MetaMap, Viewer Star and Geoview for query or reference-oriented map viewing uses.
Other options on the market combine products and services. For example, Byers Engineering’s map viewer product and object-oriented software support services and “ids” (information delivery service), a digital map publishing service and a three-year-old division of Indianapolis-based MSE Corp. The service packages existing GIS data and its ids Viewer on CD-ROM. In addition to products and services for digital distribution, many local governments are using the Internet and kiosk setups to distribute GIS and map data, as well as pursuing reproduction and marketing of hard-copy maps.
Some municipalities limit data distribution to those within municipal government, yet still require an easy-to-use system for accessing that data. Others are broadening the scope of distribution to the public. Denver-based UGC Consulting’s Bart Elliott, a consultant specializing in GIS for local governments, says ultimately the answer lies in a combination of media and mechanisms such as kiosks, the Internet and CD-ROM to meet the needs of a variety of users. However, given the current capabilities of the Internet and limitations in the transmission and presentation of graphics, Elliott prefers CD-ROM. “It’s important for a municipal GIS [owner] pursuing a distribution program to the private sector to keep in mind that the primary users – the real estate and development communities – are concerned with land records and also require flexible access to the data as opposed to being presented with a pre-set package of data,” he says. Elliott also cautions local governments to “pursue a distribution program as nothing more than a reasonable revenue generator,” and notes that those who do make a fair return on a distribution program are likely to be those who spend a proportionate amount of time at it.
Still, Elliott points out that most local government GIS groups lack the luxury of extra time to devote to such a venture. As a result, outsourcing can be an attractive option for initiating GIS data distribution programs.
Distribution Initiatives About three years ago, the city and county of Honolulu launched a GIS data licensing program that provides an annual license with the option of purchasing quarterly updates of data. The local government’s Honolulu Land Information System (HoLIS) serves 15 city departments with land use, permit, infrastructure and environmental data in over 70 layers covering more than 600 square miles.
This geographically referenced information links existing city records to precise locations on the island of Oahu. The public distribution program licenses data on tapes and diskettes in ARC/Infoexport coverage or DXF formats, the latter compatible with AutoCAD.
However, GIS Coordinator Ken Schmidt says it is merely graphic, not database, data. With the purchase of data, the buyer signs an agreement prohibiting its redistribution outside the organization.
This practice is in sharp contrast to the usage of GIS data allowed under Milwaukee’s distribution program. GIS Manager Nancy Olson expects those who buy Milwaukee’s GIS data to repackage and resell it as a targeted database or mailing list or for use in a direct marketing effort.
The city’s three-year-old distribution program uses CDs to distribute approximately 160,000 digital records on individual properties.
As with most GIS data distribution programs, the mortgage, lending, real estate and insurance industries are the primary markets.
Additionally, in Milwaukee’s case, a surprisingly large number of buyers are home improvement and repair businesses.
In addition to the conventional base of property assessment data, Milwaukee’s 90-field GIS record includes information on number of rooms and stories, year built, basements, swimming pools and owner occupancy.
It also lists geo-code data such as aldermanic districts and voting wards. “We will probably be looking at licensing in the future, but there is no provision at this time,” Olson says, pointing out that any kind of licensing arrangement in Wisconsin is tied to open records laws, which can dictate very specifically the terms and conditions of data distribution.
In the beginning, Olson says, the Milwaukee GIS data distribution effort was a matter of simply dumping records on CD-ROM. Alleviating the burden of servicing individual telephone inquiries was the motivation behind distributing the data. “Plus,” Olson says, “there was a regular contingent of information seekers simply camped outside the municipal office.”
Part of the upgrade from dumped data included the addition of an icon-based interface on the front end for searching the database – the Property Information Retrieval System (PIRS) – and an output mechanism for generating reports and mailing labels. The CD-ROM is sold by annual subscription with optional monthly updates.
As are many local governments, Dayton, Ohio, is finding a big demand for GIS data both within and outside the city. The GIS office receives a number of requests each day for map data from municipal organizations such as personnel within the fire department, water department and airport, as well as from outside interests such as developers, the University of Dayton and other entities. For Dayton, says Planning Director Liz Blume, the demand was already there; it was just a question of how to best distribute the digital map data.
Dayton had devoted roughly 12 years to building its GIS. This effort involved outsourcing as a strategy to publish, market and distribute the data on CD-ROM as a digital map product, necessary because as Brooks says, “There are only two of us in the Department of Planning who manage the GIS, and we couldn’t do it all.”
Private-sector demand for the data will, as usual, come from realtors, appraisers and engineers.
Dayton’s CDs contain data covering a 56-square-mile area. Digital orthophotography of the downtown area functions as a backdrop or underlay for the planimetric, floodplain, zoning, parks or open space, census tracts and ownership data.
“The ability to quickly access GIS data combined with the photo-realism of orthophotos gives the city a tremendous advantage for business and economic development purposes,” Blume says. “For businesses considering the Dayton area for relocation purposes, it’s easy to display the data, and the orthophotos make it look much more palatable to the eye.”
For some local governments, subcontracting the publishing and distribution can help satisfy public access law and result in a reasonable fee for access to the data.
In addition, when data distribution is pursued as a subcontracted service, a local government typically is absolved from having to budget additional funds for the program.
Under Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, Indianapolis has been focusing on privatization of city functions.
Maximizing use of the city’s GIS and its database through strategies such as broad distribution of the data, both internally and to the public, is one area of interest.
Begun in 1987 through a consortium of private and public sector organizations, the Indianapolis Mapping and Geographic Infrastructure System (IMAGIS) ultimately resulted in a GIS covering a 417-square mile area with 30 layers of data.
The city currently has 550 licenses for internal use by the departments of capital asset management, public works and administration. Division of Permits Administrator Gregg Gallant says that quick access to Indianapolis GIS data “lets us better serve our constituents with better data.”
The Indianapolis product is being sold to the public by township or as a nine-township set on CD-ROM.
The fact that the data can be accessed on conventional PC equipment is a big plus, because, until recently, making GIS data available to a wide range of users required a minimum investment of somewhere between $15,000 to $20,000 for special workstation equipment.
The Indianapolis product can show aerial photography as a background to vector feature data such as streets, parcels, zoning, rivers and utilities. More than 500 copies have been sold since April 1997.
One of the buyers, Greg Nolting with locally based Milestone Contractor, says, “Typically, we use it to view the sewers, roads and all the other features adjacent to a site under development. The aerial photography that functions as a backdrop to the Indianapolis vector data can show an addition to a parking lot or another feature that might not show up on the as-built drawing.”
Because it displays both aerial photography and vector map data, Gallant expects the Indianapolis data to be of interest to commercial realtors who might want to show a client a lot or building in relation to surrounding infrastructure facilities or transportation networks.
Irving, Texas, like Dayton, had hoped to ease much of the burden of data distribution and also generate enough revenue to help pay for the maintenance of data through the publication and distribution of affordable data on CD-ROM.
To accomplish that objective, Jill Urban-Karr, in the city’s information services department, joined with other municipal GIS representatives from across the state and formed a task force to study GIS data distribution issues, particularly fees.
After working intensely since 1995 on those issues, the group produced two reports recommending strategies for distributing GIS data at what Urban-Karr terms “a market price,” yet one that would be fair and equitable according to state legislative mandates. But despite substantial lobbying and much to the disappointment of the task force, state legislation passed last fall dashed any hopes of being able to charge a market price.
Now, Urban-Karr says, “GIS data distribution falls under the General Service Commission’s pricing structure so only the cost of data processing, materials and staff time can be recouped through fees,” not exactly what she meant by market price. Under its original GIS distribution strategy, the city planned to publish the data in a universal format that could be marketed to a variety of users, mainly businesses. While Irving planned to contract out the publishing of data on a medium like CD-ROM, it had intended to handle marketing and distribution internally. For the public distribution product, the city was to be split into four portions with each quadrant offered in three combinations of data.
The engineering (lot line and topography data) and planning options (zoning and land use data), would be downloadable in DXF format. The third option called for non-downloadable, view-only data aimed at the real estate and appraisal market.
Irving’s fire department, however, is currently using the GIS data through an application that provides mapping information, such as the location of sprinkler systems, shut-off valves and other data pertinent to fire protection.With public distribution, Urban-Karr emphasizes, “We were not ever g oing for cost recovery.” Rather, simply helping to fund the maintenance was Irving’s objective. “Even $50,000 in revenue would help underwrite about half of the annual costs of maintaining data,” Urban-Karr says.
Although the task force has tabled the GIS initiative for now, the market-price issue might be resurrected down the road after the task force sees what other states, cities and towns are doing, Urban-Karr says.
Another option involves turning over the data to a contractor who in turn would agree to some sort of a royalty payment to the city, but that alternative is in its very early stages and will require further review by the city attorney.
Right now, the city can respond to general requests by putting GIS data on floppies. It also uses an Internet home page to distribute limited types of data, including images that can be download. Tabular data, however, cannot be accessed along with the images.
Marketing the Data
Like other cities, Milwaukee uses a combination of methods for distribution. Through the Internet, address searches can be conducted by address only, making Milwaukee’s CD-ROM product more appealing to buyers who intend to do business with the data.
Marketing the availability of Milwaukee’s data has been accomplished primarily by word of mouth. The GIS Group has also used presentations and trade show booths at industry association conferences to get the word out. A recorded message on the assessor’s office voice mail also promotes the availability of GIS data in CD-ROM format.
While the data marketing program has covered the bulk of Milwaukee’s costs to develop the CD interface, “it has been a long time coming,” Olson says. Revenue aside, the PIRS program has achieved Milwaukee’s goal of wider distribution of data to the public.
And, since the city’s GIS is not funded through its general fund, any future developments will be linked to revenue generation.
The GIS group is in somewhat of a unique situation, Olson says. Technically, it is not funded by the general fund; therefore, its budget is not supported by taxes.
The city and county of Honolulu do not expect full cost recovery on their GIS, either, but they hope to generate enough money to maintain the data. For digital products, the current revenue objective is around $50,000.
Schmidt describes efforts to spread awareness about the availability of GIS data as more of a public awareness program than a marketing campaign. Those efforts have included placing media releases and making presentations at conferences and meetings.
In keeping with Honolulu’s GIS motto, “Better Public Access to Better Public Data,” a map-publishing contract was signed with HonBlue, a local publisher and marketer of maps, architectural drawings and blueprints. The agreement gives the company certain rights to take Honolulu’s digital graphic files and produce and sell hard-copy maps from the HoLIS database. Honolulu is then compensated through royalties. As for the future of GIS data distribution, the city and county are looking at new vehicles for distribution and a new digital format for data, possibly CD-ROM and the Internet.
The partners are seriously exploring new and alternative GIS software products to further enhance public access to and use of the data, Schmidt says.
Still, even with the varied mix of distribution methods, “there is an unfilled niche for customized, special request GIS maps, a value-added service,” he notes. Down the road, he hopes to provide a “fully privatized service bureau” with additional GIS map products, and data query and statistical reporting services.
Had Irving’s public distribution initiative proceeded as planned, the city would have taken somewhat of a prudent approach to marketing the data to ensure “we would be able to fulfill the requests efficiently and have a bank of CDs ready,” Urban-Karr says.
To promote the availability of data, Irving had planned to insert notices in water bills and place stories in economic development newsletters.
Whatever distribution methods and marketing strategies are chosen, however, it is clear that the debate on who should have public access to GIS data and at what price will continue. Cities and counties that take the initiative to move off-center with a strategy to effectively distribute their data will be the real winners.
Additionally, regardless of whether a local government generates revenue or simply breaks even with a GIS and map data distribution program, merely distributing the data to a wider circle of users can go far in achieving the public service mandate placed on most local governments.
Peggy Ammerman is a freelance writer in Indianapolis, specializing in technical issues.
Attendees at the recent annual conference of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association in Toronto, most of whom were local and state government officials and consultants, predicted an explosion in the use of GIS by the year 2000.
They also pointed to the Internet as the choice for information distribution to the increasing numbers of users.
According to a survey of respondents by Exton, Pa.-based Bentley Systems, attendees reported that government and public access to their GIS-related data will boom by 3,000 percent in the next three years. They also expect development of new application areas for this new population of GIS users, especially in the customer information systems arena.
Additionally, those surveyed expect that GIS and their information technology systems will eventually be unified to accommodate this increased demand.
They also believe that a client/server strategy will form the backbone of 92 percent of their automation by 2000, and standard relational databases will hold and serve the expanding set of GIS data for more than 98 percent of the systems. Spatial data will be integrated with other types of data, including engineering and imaging, in some 80 percent of those systems.
Fifty-six percent of the survey respondents were state and local government managers, responsible for assets averaging $765 million. The amount of their assets anticipated to be managed by automation will more than double by the turn of the century, they said.
For more information on the survey, contact Bentley Systems at (800) BENTLEY; or access the company’s web site at www.bentley.com.
Not long ago, a municipal GIS was a complex computer database and mapping system useful only to engineering departments. As the technology has matured, its value has spread to many city departments and even the general public.
In Brookline, Mass., a tree-lined urban community near Boston, a GIS was initiated by the engineering and public works department three years ago to catalog and map water and wastewater facilities. From the beginning, the project received support from the town manager and other town department heads who realized it would benefit them all.
The Information Technologies Department, part of the Finance Department, soon took over the development and maintenance of the GIS and led its expansion to all other departments. Cambridge, Mass.-based Camp Dresser & McKee designed the framework, gathered and converted data, developed user applications and trained users on the system. A dedicated GIS manager was hired and a GIS steering committee made up of the heads of 13 departments, named.
The town decided early to use Boston Edison’s existing digital landbase of street centerline, pavement edges, backs of sidewalks and building footprints for the core of the GIS base data, saving 18 months in development time. Water, sewer and drain networks and parcel data were converted and developed, as were data on police precincts and dispatching districts, zoning, school districts, school buffer zones, neighborhoods, one-way streets, stop signs, bus routes and open spaces.
By the end of the first year, the town had completed a majority of the data development and upgraded the necessary computer hardware. The main ARC/INFO systemresides on a UNIX workstation and is accessed via ArcView throughout the town’s offices over an existing local area network.
The town’s GIS staff formed user groups and wrote manuals to guide users and encourage them to use the GIS on a day-to-day basis. Additionally, it is preparing a special training session for all department heads, as well as general users.
In the second year, the GIS department developed more than 30 analytical products, including:
* a fire department map pinpointing the locations of fire hydrants; * a database for tree maintenance and replacement; * a map for attendees of town meetings that outlines the town’s capital plan; and * a map for the selectman’s office that displays commercially zoned areas, town-owned properties and one-meter interval contours to assist in discussion of a zoning bylaw regulating antennas for commercial use.
All told, Brookline’s GIS was up and running in two years. (Municipal GISs typically take up to five years to develop.)
“The primary reason we have been so successful,” says Feng Yang, the town’s GIS manager, “is that we’ve had total cooperation from everyone. There have been no political problems or fighting for control. We all recognize that successful implementation of the GIS will improve the efficiency of the maintenance of Brookline’s infrastructure, improve inter-departmental communications through sharing of data and elimination of duplication and improve our ability to analyze options for land planning and development.
Water: It is Miami’s greatest blessing and biggest curse.
It is water – the ocean and the Everglades – that draws millions of tourists to the region each year. But it is also water – the kind whipped up by tropical storms and hurricanes – that creates a variety of problems that the city must contend with during the wet season.
Sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs) – a three-letter acronym that is more like a four-letter word to the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department (MDWASD) are among the worst of those problems. Although SSOs afflict many cities nationwide, Miami has been hit particularly hard because of its terrain: The highest elevation is only 40 feet above sea level, and the groundwater table is only three to six feet below the earth’s surface. When it rains, it is as if the ground is sopping up a giant spill, sucking water through sandy earth and further still into the cracks of some of the sanitary sewer pipes crisscrossing beneath Metropolitan Dade County. When unexpected water makes its way into these pipes, the system is overloaded.
Clogs occur, pump stations fail, and sanitary sewers overflow.
Downtown flooding in the late 1980s and early ’90s inundated intersections and caused raw sewage to spill into the Miami River, prompting Metropolitan Dade County to sign consent decrees with EPA and settlement agreements with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection that mandated comprehensive sanitary sewer system rehabilitation.
As a result, MDWASD today is in the middle of a $1.1 billion project to upgrade by 2002 its sanitary sewer system, a sprawling utility created in 1973 from 30 smaller ones. The project includes major force main and pump station capacity improvements, upgrades and expansions of three wastewater treatment plants, and studies of how the department manages and operates the water and wastewater utility.
A $4.4 million GIS is included in the billion-dollar project. When complete, the system will depict the entire 414-square-mile service area under MDWASD’s jurisdiction.
The project involves converting MDWASD’s 1,106 paper maps of water and sewer structures to digital format; combining planimetric data created in ARC/INFO with the digital water and sewer atlas maps; using GPS surveying to locate more than 180,000 above-ground water and sanitary sewer structures at near-centimeter-level accuracy; and developing an accurate and complete utility network for use in ARC/INFO and ArcView.
The resulting infrastructure management system will be the basis for system upgrades, facility modeling, work-order processing, planning, mapping and other applications. Why GPS and GIS?
MDWASD knew it needed updated, accurate information – and quickly – to help meet the consent decrees and upgrade not only the sanitary sewer but also potable water systems.
Although the utility had thousands of source documents, greater accuracy would be required for eventual modeling purposes.
Additionally, structures were being added or altered daily; thus, a better method than producing paper maps twice a year to keep the data current was needed.
Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) pen-based PC GPS – an industry first – was selected for collecting data in the field because it could quickly identify above-ground structures at centimeter-level accuracy. The method also could locate structures not featured on the paper maps: originally, 170,000 structures (valves, hydrants, treatment plants, manholes and pump stations) were slated to be identified, but that number would in fact become 182,000 as additional structures not featured on the source documents were found in the field. Now that the GPS Primary Sweep is almost finished, MDWASD has a near-complete inventory of its sanitary sewer and water features.
RTK pen-based PC GPS was a brand-new marriage of technologies created in a collaborative effort between Woolpert, the Dayton, Ohio-based prime contractor, and Trimble, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based GPS technology firm. (Subconsultants on the project were Post, Buckley, Schuh & Jernigan and Weidener Surveying and Mapping, both of Miami, and C.A.P. Engineering Consultants of Coral Gables, Fla.)
Moreover, GPS-to-GIS integration proved easy with the new GPS method. Prior to the GPS phase, MDWASD’s 1,106 1 foot-equals-300 feet scale water and sewer atlas maps containing water, sewer and property data were scanned and georeferenced to the department’s existing photogrammetrically created planimetric base map containing edges of pavement and property data. These images were then loaded into the pen-based PCs and used as a backdrop GIS by surveyors in the field. Attribute data collected in the field were automatically formatted for bulk-loading into the correct GIS data layers.
The Primary Sweep went five times faster and cost up to 50 percent less than one accomplished using post-processed kinematic GPS, which involves lengthy post-processing and quality-control procedures, and conventional utility-location surveying techniques, such as photogrammetry, which requires utility painting, aerial photography and analytic triangulation. All geographic information systems are spatial: Structures are identified in relation to other structures. The MDWASD GIS is also horizontally and vertically accurate down to the near-centimeter-level collected in the field-inventory phase.
In other words, the GIS is a virtual representation of what is on top of and even in the ground.
This kind of precision initially posed cartographic challenges: to date, no GIS had achieved legible centimeter-level accuracy at a usable map scale.
And Miami commonly and historically used a 1-foot-to-300-feet scale but needed the GIS to still retain the high accuracies of structures captured during the GPS utility inventory phase for engineering purposes.
As a result, a new programming methodology had to be developed to legibly “squeeze” symbols for various structures onto tiny spaces in the GIS layers, still accurately represent each structure’s location and network connectivity.
Solving Problems
Approximately 40 percent of the total sewage flow to Metro Dade’s treatment plants during rainy weather is linked to infiltration/inflow (I/I), which in turn brings on SSOs. By repairing or replacing problem pipes, MDWASD has slashed peak flow to the plants by 50 million gallons per day, eliminating proposed capacity upgrades for 90 pump stations and saving the department $10 million in construction money. Still, the I/I condition is difficult to quantify. With the GIS, MDWASD will be able to develop a model of I/I problems and get a more accurate assessment of pipe repair and replacement needs.
New sanitary sewer system construction projects can get expensive in Miami and Dade County because of the severe design constraints engineers face with the flat terrain and high groundwater table. The GIS offers the precise locations of existing utility structures, including invert elevations and piping connectivity. Because of more accurate modeling, new construction could be designed more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Additionally, the cost to maintain a pipe is almost always cheaper than the cost to replace it.
The GIS will enable MDWASD to better preserve pipes by using modeling and data analysis to predict corrosion early, allowing for preventive maintenance.
Moreover, because of the accuracy obtained in the field-inventory phase, the GIS will allow maintenance crews to more precisely locate ailing pipes or other problematic utility components, reducing the size of construction zones and even allowing for trenchless technology.
MDWASD will also be better able to deal with a crisis situation, such as a water main break requiring immediate valve identification and closure to isolate the failing pipe segment. The GIS will help staff alert affected customers to service interruptions. And finally, it will help locate utility structures covered by debris in the aftermath of major storms – an important benefit to a region that is still feeling the effects of Hurricane Andrew.
The GIS could also help prevent water loss by identifying weak spots in the water system or detecting components that need maintenance before they become problems.
Valves, for example, need to be “exercised” or rotated on a periodic basis to prevent them from becoming rusted in position.
The valve-exercising program, as well as other utility maintenance efforts, will be based on a computer maintenance management system (CMMS) that uses the GIS to organize information about each water and sanitary sewer system component, allowing for a variety of maintenance and prioritization programs. A work-order processing system will be related to the CMMS, enabling better customer service, dispatching and follow-through for complaints and repairs. The system will unify MDWASD’s 30 office/plant locations, allowing uniform querying and plotting capabilities and eliminating duplicated work efforts.
This article was written by Jose Lopez, GIS Manager for the Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department.