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Metro Transit Division - King County DOT

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Project Goal

The Transportation Network Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Data Maintenance Initiative (TNET) is a multi-phase project to put in place:

1). A new high-accuracy, multi-modal geospatial transportation line data layer enabling a variety of transportation applications that were not previously possible;

2). A new data maintenance application;

3). The infrastructure necessary for various public and private agencies throughout King County to maintain their “owned” portions of the network.

This project has also initiated a consortium of regional cities, County departments, and other agencies participating in maintaining a seamless database of transportation related spatial and attribute datasets. Geographic and tabular data are maintained locally at each agency in replicated, independent, self-sustaining, client environments. Changes made by each agency are automatically submitted to a central master repository, verified, and then distributed back out to all other agencies. This cooperative arrangement permits the availability of a high-accuracy, up-to-date transportation network suitable for a variety of transportation planning, operations, and related business functions throughout the region.

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Business Problem Solved

In early 2000, King County Executive Ron Sims expressed his vision for the County to become a regional GIS service provider and to more efficiently provide GIS services to the public. At the same time, local jurisdictions were increasingly frustrated with their inability to use their data with business data from other jurisdictions and from the County. GIS Program Managers within these agencies and King County government were increasingly confronted by the challenges arising from an uncoordinated approach to data maintenance.

The TNET Program was designed to foster the Executive’s vision and to meet the needs of local jurisdictions for data maintenance coordination. It provides the necessary infrastructure to insure our ability to address transportation planning, endangered species protection, and emergency response through a coordinated, multi-jurisdictional data maintenance effort for a regional transportation network geospatial data layer. The TNET Program also resolved the technical barriers to communication, and initiated a “grass-roots” effort to organize the GIS Program Managers within each of the agencies. Each agency shares the responsibility of data maintenance and the benefits of a single integrated transportation network.

Technology Implemented

TNET Consortium agencies maintain local copies of the transportation network stored at their site in Oracle, SQL Server, or in a personal geodatabase. They use ArcMap to maintain the geography, and a customized user interface ArcMap extension for attributes that makes uses of drop down lists and valid value ranges to ensure data integrity. This application was developed by ESRI using Visual Basic and ArcObjects. Using Tadpole Cartesia’s GO! Sync technology (http://www.tadpolecartesia.com/html/), changes made by each agency are sent to a centrally stored master data repository as very small XML files. These changes are played against the master and then redistributed out to other participating data maintainers. The master repository uses Oracle and ArcSDE to store the transportation network.

Development Team Biography

The Transportation Network (TNET) development effort was made possible by the Transit GIS Team: Mike Berman (Transit GIS Program Manager), Tamara Davis (Database Administrator), Tim Moore and Steve Krippner (Application Support and Development), and Trang Bui and Gunnar Goerlitz (Data Maintainers). Contributions were also provided by King County Road Services, the King County GIS Center, ESRI, Tadpole-Cartesia, and Geographic Data Technology.

In addition to leading the Transit GIS Team, Mike is active in several Federal level initiatives developing national standards for transit spatial objects including Geospatial One Stop, Transit Communications Interface Profiles, and the UNETRANS development effort with ESRI.

Tamara supports Transit’s GIS Databases including TNET. She is also involved in testing and evaluating GPS data received from transit buses as part of a fleetwide technology integration project that includes automated vehicle location and tracking.

Tim and Steve develop and support desktop, internet, and non-interactive enterprise GIS applications including a nationally recognized Transit Security Incident Management System, the agency’s core Bus Stop Information System, and the ESRI-developed TNET ArcGIS Extension.

Trang and Gunnar were instrumental in performing quality control on the TNET data, developing best practices for data maintenance, and they are the designated data maintainers for transportation network features managed by Transit.