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May 19, 2008

Public could soon have access to city’s geographic data

By Kelly Young

kyoung@jacksonvilleprogress.com

The City of Jacksonville’s Geographic Information Systems program is an in-depth computer mapping program that one day could potentially hold information on every minute detail of the city’s infrastructure — from every property line and water pipe to every stop sign and fire hydrant.

But before that information becomes a part of GIS it must be input into the system — a process GIS Coordinator Kenneth Doman has been undertaking for nearly the last year.

Now that a sizable amount of information has been incorporated into the Jacksonville GIS, the city is preparing to make a portion of that information available to the public.

“It’s coming along pretty well. We are still collecting a lot of information and we have collected a lot of good information, so now we are working with all the department heads to figure out what information we can make available for the general public to view,” Doman said. “Right now we are technologically set up to where we could do it, but it’s a matter of planning at this point. We are trying to determine how much information we can make public without causing any homeland security issues.”

According to Doman, when GIS goes public it will probably have two sign-in options, each offering a different informational focus.

“We will probably have a guest sign-in, where people can access general information about the city. We would also have a sign-in with a name and a password, where people could access more features, including their particular information,” he said. “General public information would include things like when the trash is picked up and what council district they vote in. People who sign-in would have access to information like property lines and specific things like that.”

One of the projects Doman has completed as GIS coordinator is cataloging all 602 of the city’s fire hydrants; inputting the location of each hydrant, the color of the top, the number of stems on it, whether special tools are needed to open it, its flow rate and what year it was built. Soon he plans to tackle the tedious task of registering all 5,000-plus water meters.

Doman is also working with several departments within the city, teaching them how to use the program for their own purposes. The fire, police and water departments are all currently trying to learn their own specific applications of the GIS system.

“We are definitely seeing the benefits of GIS already — we were starting to see the benefits from this in just the first few weeks. Using GIS, the water department has been able to find water lines that they previously didn’t know existed,” Doman said. “It’s also let us save a lot of time on planning and zoning issues. The information for a zoning change that would have normally taken a few days of research can now be popped out in about 30 minutes.”

GIS is expected to be ready for public use in the next few months, but Doman said it is still too far away to pinpoint a start-up date. The mapping tool will be accessed through a link on the city’s Web site, www.jacksonville-texas.com.

“It has kept me busy, but I think it will be a very useful tool for the citizens once we get it started. There will be some things that the people can do with this system that they currently can’t do, but a lot of it is just making the information that is available to them easier to use,” he said.

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