|
Back to SAG Winners 2004
Cobb County
View Photo(s) of Award Presentation
Project Goal
The establishment of an enterprise GIS to accomplish the county's GIS mission "To create, operate, and maintain an efficient and cost-effective Geographic Information System in support of the Board of Commissioners, elected officials, and all county departments and to collaborate with other government and non-government entities to provide responsive, and useful location based information services.
To support this mission, the county's GIS is organized as a balanced, distributed system with both the county departments and a central GIS Core Group working together to ensure the health and robustness of the GIS.
Learn more about us
Learn more about our application
Business Problem Solved
In the early 1990's Cobb County attempted to implement a county-wide GIS. This attempt ended in failure with several departments going off individually to try to implement a GIS to service their needs. Because each department had different amounts of funding available for their GIS, a result was that various base maps, at different, accuracies and completeness were created and GIS hardware and software was acquired and implemented with various and limited success. By 1999 there were 7 GIS users throughout the county, the majority who used the GIS for mapping purposes only.
In November of 1999 the county's Board of Commissioners adopted the county's Five Year GIS Implementation Plan. This plan consisted of six major program elements, database development, hardware, software, application development, personnel, and overall project management.
Five years later the county has completed or is in final stages of completion of its four cornerstone databases, 100' scale, .5 ft. full color digital orthophotography (we are on our third flyover and have collected over a terabyte of imagery), 150,000 linear miles of 2 ft. contours (2.5 million spot elevation points), converted and are updating 220,000 parcels, and will complete in December 2004, Cobb ETRANS our enterprise transportation database which will serve E911, the Department of Transportation, Cobb Community Transit (bus system) and our web routing applications. All cornerstone databases are in SDE (imagery) or geodatabases (contours, parcels, ETRANS) and have been registered to our orthophotography and are good for 1” = 100” scale mapping for the whole county. We have approximately 60 departmental databases, the majority are now registered to our orthophotophy and are striving to match the 100 scale accuracy. Departmental databases grow constantly.
We have developed, or bought and modified, over 15 GIS desktop/web applications to support the access, analyses, mapping and reporting needs of our agencies, departments and offices. These applications are used by our Water System, DOT, Police and Fire Departments, Community Development Agency, Property Management, and Economic Development Agencies.
Technology Implemented
The technology used for implementing our enterprise GIS includes ArcGIS and its associated extensions, ArcIMS, ArcSDE, SQL Server and Oracle relational databases. We also use Leica and Trimble GPS technologies to collect field data.
Development Team Biography
Rather than a development team we tend to think of those involved in the county's GIS effort as our enterprise GIS team. This team consists of our Board of Commissioners - 5 members, County Manager, GIS Sponsors Group (department and agency heads - 9 members), Technical Advisory Team (departmental managers, professionals and technicians - 15 members),GIS Core Group (GIS manager, 2 analysts, and a technician - 4 members) and our user group (200+ members from all backgrounds). (Graphic 3)
Everyone involved in Cobb County’s GIS effort use their variety of experience, skills, education, and training to ensure its continued success.
|
)
)
)