Town redesigns online land use application
Southampton, N.Y., has created an online GIS and property control system to help area businesses access information about land management, mass appraisals, tax billing and assessments, and utilities. The system, which will launch this fall, is an updated version of the town’s three-year-old online GIS.
In 1999, an employee in the Southampton Information Services Department developed a customized, online GIS application that let users search for property information and view corresponding property maps. The site also allowed users to view current and historical aerial photography, as well as tax assessments and other documents related to properties.
Southampton opened the site for use by real estate agents, contractors, title companies and other professionals that routinely visited town hall for land-use information. Users paid subscription fees to the town to access the site from their office computers, and the town set up complimentary kiosks in public buildings and libraries to provide everyone with free access to the data.
While the site helped users get the information they needed more easily than they could by visiting Town Hall, it had a few problems. Users complained that the site was slow to retrieve maps and property information, that the information was not printer friendly and that they could not access the information from every type of computer. Additionally, town staff members had to export map and property data to the online site nightly.
By summer 2000, Southampton wanted to improve the GIS Web site and eliminate its limitations. It contracted with Montreal, Canada-based KHEOPS technologies for a redesign.
In less than three months, Southampton had a new site that could display maps and property information on any Web browser and on any operating system. Staff members no longer needed to update the site nightly because it pulled data directly from the town’s databases.
The redesigned site provides users with maps that are more flexible than those on the previous site. For example, on the old site, users viewed maps that were displayed using raster output, which meant the maps looked like static photos. If users wanted to zoom in, the town’s server had to create a new version of the image before sending it to the viewer’s browser.
The town’s new site uses vector streamlining to display maps. With the new maps, site visitors can query the site, and zoom and pan much like town employees can do using the town’s internal GIS software. They can turn layers on and off, and get results instantly. The maps are pulled directly from the town’s GIS database and are not recreated in alternate forms to display on the Web.
Southampton paid for the Web site redesign with users’ subscription fees. With future subscription fees, the town plans to develop custom Web-based GIS applications containing different amounts of property information for residents and employees.
