Full Description

The Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Water Department (PWD) has significant responsibilities fortracking the location and condition of its infrastructure assets. Consequently, there is ahigh level of engineering drawing and map usage by PWD. During the development ofits Geographic Information System (GIS) Strategic Plan, PWD identified the need topreserve and protect paper maps and drawings spanning 140 years, and also to streamlineaccess to these important documents. In fact, the Plan identified that access to recorddrawings was a more timely need than the conversion of all its facilities into a moretraditional GIS. To accomplish this need a raster-imaging project was initiated whichinvolves scanning the hardcopy data sources and indexing them for easy retrieval using aweb-based GIS.Although the raster-imaging project is the primary topic of this presentation,significant time is given to the Intranet based application that allows PWD employees toquickly identify and view the scanned maps and drawings. Using a browser-based GISapplication, documents are retrieved by entering a street or intersection location orzooming in to various street segments through a map of the City. Users can then view,mark up, print, and e-mail the records as needed. A demonstration of the application isincluded in the presentation.This project also triggered the need for PWD to reengineer its processes for thecreation and maintenance of record drawings. Tools were developed to support this needand will be discussed in conjunction with the access software.An unanticipated, but fully appreciated benefit of the raster-imaging project is theeasier transition for the facility data conversion, which is presently underway. Includes tables, figures.

Product Details

Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 06/01/2001 Number of Pages: 16File Size: 1 file , 620 KB