13/07
The Summer 2009 Issue of the GIS Certification Institute newsletter (GISC-Eye) featured stories from GISP members from around the country discussing sharing geospatial data. The following is Kevin's contribution entitled: Sharing Data is Good for Business, Taxpayers and Ratepayers, and the Local Economy
The most recent payback for the City of Fort Wayne and the GIS Department was sharing our 2008 Orthophotography with Indiana University, Bloomington (IU) and their University Information
Technology Services department.
We gave them all of our orthophotos in .TIFF and .SID formats, and in return they processed those photos and sent us a new ECW format for free. The software to convert our photos to .ECW costs about $5,000; we didn’t have to pay for new software! The .ECW format also generates an orthophoto on your screen much faster than anything we’ve seen before.
IU also now hosts our orthophotos on their website, where they manage a portal for the public to download files themselves. Once again, the City saves time and money by not having the overhead of managing a website for that purpose, not having to hire programming services, nor having the cumbersome timeconsuming process of billing and accounting. Not to mention the fact that citizens have already paid for these orthophotos with their taxes and utility fees, so this way we aren’t “doubledipping.”
The second most recent payback from sharing the orthophotos was by receiving a local private electric utility company’s service area boundaries so we could then add them to our map as an overlay with our public water and sewer assets. This gives us the visual ability now to identify where the electric utility may have buried power lines in areas where our utility crews are going to dig. This is a benefit toward worker safety. So not only are we saving money, we are possibly saving lives.
The City’s GIS Department obtained a grant from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in conjunction with the USGS, which valued $23,000 and the City kicked in $60,000. All total, with the savings of not purchasing new software for the .ECWs, not having to manage web portals for downloads and the tedious billing process, and the worker safety net by having other utility service areas on our maps, the payback is priceless for us.
The most recent payback for the City of Fort Wayne and the GIS Department was sharing our 2008 Orthophotography with Indiana University, Bloomington (IU) and their University Information
Technology Services department.
We gave them all of our orthophotos in .TIFF and .SID formats, and in return they processed those photos and sent us a new ECW format for free. The software to convert our photos to .ECW costs about $5,000; we didn’t have to pay for new software! The .ECW format also generates an orthophoto on your screen much faster than anything we’ve seen before.
IU also now hosts our orthophotos on their website, where they manage a portal for the public to download files themselves. Once again, the City saves time and money by not having the overhead of managing a website for that purpose, not having to hire programming services, nor having the cumbersome timeconsuming process of billing and accounting. Not to mention the fact that citizens have already paid for these orthophotos with their taxes and utility fees, so this way we aren’t “doubledipping.”
The second most recent payback from sharing the orthophotos was by receiving a local private electric utility company’s service area boundaries so we could then add them to our map as an overlay with our public water and sewer assets. This gives us the visual ability now to identify where the electric utility may have buried power lines in areas where our utility crews are going to dig. This is a benefit toward worker safety. So not only are we saving money, we are possibly saving lives.
The City’s GIS Department obtained a grant from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in conjunction with the USGS, which valued $23,000 and the City kicked in $60,000. All total, with the savings of not purchasing new software for the .ECWs, not having to manage web portals for downloads and the tedious billing process, and the worker safety net by having other utility service areas on our maps, the payback is priceless for us.
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