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For those of you who were fortunate enough to register in time, the third in a series of 12 exciting on-line GIS seminars was held Tuesday, December 7 at GeonetCom.com This seminar was billed as "Internet GIS for the Municipality" and was capably presented by Mr. Jonathan Pickus of the Las Vegas Water District (LVWD). The seminar dealt with the problems and solutions faced by experts in Las Vegas in their quest to transform their paper-based maps into dynamic websites using Autodesk MapGuide. The initial poll of seminar attendees revealed that approximately 50% were management and the other 50% were from technical positions. Mr. Pickus began by offering a brief objective of the project, one commonly faced by managers in municipal and AM/FM settings - putting into place a system which will provide a full range of GIS capabilities, system wide, over the internet. Not only must the system be simple to use, but it must also fully integrate and manage the existing water distribution system, customer records, digital land base, and database records, including the existing as-built drawings. In addition, the system must be able to accomodate planners, facility design team members and AM/FM/GIS staff. And, as is true in most municipal and government settings, the new system plan had to be "sold" and "justified" to management, who tend to be unaware of the potential benefits. Another important aspect of the system, certainly not to be overlooked, was that it needed to be easily updated and modified when LVWD took over from the contractor. The LVWD System is a typical Client Side Internet Mapping Application. It serves multiple users and provides them access to an interactive vector-based mapping system. This vector-based mapping system is able to dynamically generate spatial/thematic queries, reports, and complex mapping operations, using a simple graphical map-driven user interface. There were several important considerations in software selection. For starters, "core" business functions needed to be addressed, existing data needed to be incorporated into the system, and "out of the box" capabilities were needed in order to minimize the amount of programming required to get the system up and running.  Main Function Provided by the System Live System Demo Mr. Pickus then proceeded to walk us through a live demo of the LVWD Mapping System or "Facility View System." The system is based on Autodesk's Mapguide software and was developed by GateKeeper Systems, of Pasadena, California. The water district enlisted the help of GateKeeper in order to draw on their expertise and experience in Internet based mapping, and particularly, Mapguide experience.  View of the LVWD "Facility View" Main Screen The developement of the system is estimated to have cost roughly $200,000. This amount, however, does not include the years that have gone into collecting and maintaining the existing data. A quick tour of the Facility View System quickly revealed to me how users can select objects locally, enabling them to easily produce maps, charts, tables, and reports based on user-defined selections and queries of the existing database(s). The system was developed so that LVWD users can easily map pre-defined views, accessible by right clicking the mouse, or they may select from a list of options using a familiar wizard function. Mr. Pickus was quick to point out that Mapguide provided a number of embedded functions which saved time and money in developing the system. We were shown a number of live mapping functions including some user-defined selections, polygon overlay operations, buffering, and other spatial functions. All were quickly, and easily invoked and the results were displayed in familiar summary formats including report, table, and spreadsheet summaries. Spatial queries generated tidy tabular results, often hyperlinked to related documents, maps, or drawings. This proved to me how tightly the reporting mechanism has been integrated into their existing business processes.  User-Defined Selection and Tabular Output Choices Summary This seminar was a nice look at a success story. I felt it was a great example of a web-mapping application that is used by a great multitude of users to simplify their day-to-day business processes. The Mapguide driven system used by LVWD has the capability to bring in raster and vector data from a variety of formats, and tightly coordinates data sharing issues that are common in AM/FM applications. Once again, I was impressed with the GeonetCom conference presentation software, especially since we were presented with a live internet mapping demo. Connections and redraws were relatively quick and there were no apparent technical problems throughout the hour long presentation.... nice job! The Las Vegas Valley Water District (LVWD) website can be found at http://www.lvvwd.com Jonathan Pickus may be contacted at jon.pickus@lvvwd.com Next Seminar Be sure to attend the next GeonetCom seminar entitled: Using GIS to Competitive Advantage December 14 & December 16, 12-1 p.m. EST When you have all the information at your fingertips, you have the edge. Michael DeLacy, President of Microdesk, discusses how North East Optic Network designs and manages their fiber optic cable network with automatic web-based updates to gain a competitive advantage. You must see this stellar application using AutoCAD Map and Autodesk MapGuide. By Glenn Letham, editor |
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