July 15, 2009
San Diego, California—The City of Boston Management and Information Services received a Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award today at the 2009 ESRI International User Conference (ESRI UC) in San Diego, California. The city received this honor for its vision, leadership, and innovative use of ESRI’s geographic information system (GIS) technology. The city was selected from more than 300,000 organizations worldwide and recognized during today’s SAG awards ceremony for making extraordinary contributions to our global society.
Since the early 1990’s, the City of Boston Management and Information Services has been integrating GIS as part of its core business applications, including a self-maintaining master addressing database and improving the street centerline file. It also launched a GIS Web page where citizens can gain access to a wealth of information not previously readily accessible. The Property Data Viewer provides information on property ownership, building and land valuation, and lot size; the Neighborhood Data Viewer locates local polling places and city services such as the nearest library, health center, and community center; and the Capital Project Data Viewer provides a description of the budget and planned work of city projects. To meet the city's greenhouse gas reduction targets and support the Solar Boston program, the city is using Web-based GIS technology to map current solar installations, track progress toward the mayor's goal, and allow Bostonians to analyze their rooftop solar energy potential.
Integrating GIS into the city's business processes has allowed it to better manage and accurately facilitate constituent calls and determine how they are resolved—the city has also seen an overall increase in management efficiency. GIS is enabling city departments and the public to perform better analysis, to streamline and improve planning efforts, to foster productive sharing of information between departments, and to provide the public with timely accurate location-based information. The city is currently working towards developing an enterprise GIS, which will help eliminate redundancies and reduce costs through common spatial data layers. Expanding the data warehouse will provide a mechanism for core GIS data layers to be made freely and easily available to the public.
"Our world is being challenged by rapid change,” says Jack Dangermond, ESRI president. “GIS technology is increasingly being deployed as a way to understand the issues facing our society. At ESRI, we are always extremely impressed with the work of our users and want to recognize their efforts with our Special Achievement in GIS Award. Their work is a great example of using GIS to improve our world.”
GIS combines computer hardware, software, and data to collect, manage, and analyze geographic information. Virtually any information can be linked to a geographic location, helping people to see that information as part of a complete picture. With GIS, users can view relationships, processes, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and charts. Whether they are selecting routes to transport ethanol, or studying landslides, GIS helps them see how the world works and changes. More than one million people across the globe rely on GIS to solve problems and make better decisions by thinking and planning geographically.
Other organizations being honored at the ESRI UC include Artesia Water Company, Montana State Library, NASA Langley Research Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Yosemite National Park, City of Madrid, DHL Express, Polytechnic of Namibia, Victoria Police in Australia, and the Grammar School at Leeds.
To learn more about the 2009 SAG Award winners and to view their photos and project descriptions and images, visit www.esri.com/sag. More information about ESRI and its GIS solutions can be found at www.esri.com.
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Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically.
The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including
each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of
Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more
than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world's
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