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“ One of the projects funded under this program was the development of Internet GIS applications for Local Government. The project involved working with vendors and councils to select the most appropriate solution for their unique situation to gain the maximum return on the investment of time and resources. ” |
The Mapping Manningham website was sponsored by the the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV) is the peak local government body in Victoria, representing the State's 78 councils.
In late 1999, a decision was taken to develop a state wide online service delivery strategy (LGOS – Local Government Online Service) as the most effective response to the availability of significant ‘Networking the Nation’ funding.
One of the projects funded under this program was the development of Internet GIS applications for Local Government. The project involved working with vendors and councils to select the most appropriate solution for their unique situation to gain the maximum return on the investment of time and resources.
Problem
Manningham City Council’s intention was to provide the Community with on-line access to Council and Public information, utilising an easy-to-use GIS interface. This information was previously only available over the telephone or by visiting the Municipal Office. The on-line GIS needed to be easy to use, as some members of the community have no or little computer knowledge.
As the Internet GIS solution is for use by each Council’s community, it must:
- be easy to use, intuitive and require no user training
- run on standard Internet browsers and not require plug-ins to be downloaded
- be designed to work over low capacity modem.
Manningham set a list of mandatory functionality they wanted included in the site:
- Basic zoom, pan, window an area, print (including date time stamp, Council logo and disclaimer – defined by the Council).
- Distance and area calculations.
- Scale dependent feature display – based on a table of features established by the Council, the features displayed would alter depending on the scale of the view. This could also update the legend for the view.
- Find a property – it is expected that the GIS solution would accept PIP data. Using this data the user should be able to find a property within the municipal area.
- When does the ‘abc’ happen at this location? – the GIS needs to be able to assist users determining when the ‘abc’ (rubbish collection, street tree pruning, road grading etc) happens. This information is expected to be in a polygon/area format (e.g. these areas have their bins collected on Wednesdays, these Thursdays etc) and extracted by the GIS.
- Links to web pages – web pages should be accessible from the GIS (e.g. clicking on the Council Tip in the GIS should allow you to go to the web page and find its opening hours, charges etc.)
- Search items from a Council defined pull down list (e.g. the tip).
Solution
GeoSamba provided the perfect solution for this project.
GeoSamba’s open, service oriented architecture allowed for it to easily interact with the Councils existing suite of ESRI products, including ArcIMS, the map-renderer selected for the project. Being database independent, system administrators can easily connect to any ODBC compliant database structure – MS Access, SQL Server, Oracle.
GeoSamba’s easy-to-use interface allows community members to do simple property address enquires, display a wide range of GIS datasets including Aerial Photography and output both tabular and map products.
In addition to the community Internet version, Council wanted an Extranet version for council staff. GeoSamba’s inbuilt security functionality allowed for a ‘username and password’ feature to be added, providing council staff with improved spatial data quality and greater access to information at home or at the Municipal Office. Additional information including financial resources and usage statistics were also made available to council staff.
Benefits
Councils are now required to be more responsive to ratepayer requests for information and services. GeoSamba allows the Manningham City Council to be pro-active in sharing a variety of information with its ratepayers and other interested parties.
GeoSamba’s ultra-thin web client guarantees fast performance, even over a 56K modem. It enables data to be merged and analysed from disparate databases and served through a user friendly interface. GeoSamba supports all versions of Internet Explorer and all releases of Netscape post version 6, making it accessible to most rate payers.
GeoSamba’s user-friendly interface is intuitive and easy to use so no user training is required. GeoSamba’s inbuilt mapping functionality met all Manningham’s mandatory requirements, providing users with the choice using graphical tools to select a location on the map or select a property via a dropdown list for relevant information (for example, rubbish collection, street tree pruning) that will occur at that location.
GeoSamba’s ability to integrate with Microsoft Office products provides council staff with a broad range of communication capabilities including mail merges and other report documents to be driven from map selections.
Being database independent, GeoSamba can be easily linked to community databases such as business directories, volunteers group and facility management/booking systems.