Challenge:
The offices of Boulder County, Colorado, maintained their in-house web mapping site that jointly shared information accessed by the Assessor’s Office, Land Use, Public Health, and Parks & Open Space offices. The county government in this thriving, highly populated area had historically provided public mapping access over the Internet with their E-Mapping program, built and maintained by Boulder County IT staff using Esri’s ArcGIS internet mapping software. With a staff savvy in GIS, their in-house team sufficiently met the mapping and assessment needs of the county for the past several years.
When they needed to upgrade from their current software platforms, meaning their current ArcIMS implementation would no longer be compatible. To remain connected to their upgraded Accela and Custom CAMA databases, Boulder County needed to replace this system with an ArcGIS Server implementation which they were unable to build themselves while maintaining their high-quality standards.
This mapping data was important to the County as a way to allow the public easy access to a wide array of geospatial and county data via maps on the internet. Maintaining and improving aspects of the current user functionality and available information was extremely important for the end product.
Solution:
After an extensive search, and based on our reputation for delivering robust service-based software, Boulder County selected GCS out of a large pool of qualified applicants from across the country. GCS developed the new E-Mapping site with C# and custom ArcGIS Server programming services using Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft SQL Server.
The parcel mapping interface offers a customized search tool for Boulder County that interfaces with outside search and display tools maintained by other departments. GCS developed 58 data layers with symbology, labels, map tips, and scale dependencies for clarity. The e-mapping application also integrates with Boulder County’s database applications. The secure site provides user authentication, to classify users by privilege level, and only offers restricted features to specialized users of the site.
Result:
The Boulder County E-Mapping Application provides the County’s GIS team, as well as the general public, an accessible, intuitive, online property database that can be searched by property owner, address, account or parcel number, subdivision and section-township-range, and provides road and infrastructure information as well.
Overlaid on high-quality imagery, the site provides quick and easy access to powerful tools to view and analyze the data, such as measurement tools and Google Earth and Microsoft Bing maps.
With continued support and communication with GCS, the GIS staff for Boulder County was able to take on maintenance and update themselves for this custom implementation.
“Our GIS manager has picked up how to manage the code pretty quickly and we are getting quite a list of what folks would like next. Quite a testimony to a job well done.”
Cynthia Braddock, GIS Deputy Assessor, Boulder County Assessor’s Office
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