The County’s Internet GIS was launched in July of 1997 and was developed entirely in-house. There is very little Java script and no API customization. The website is a “general purpose” one, having no specific application or customer in mind and is publicly available to everyone via the Internet.

Pima County serves up their maps using Autodesk’s MapGuide software and Cold Fusion from Allaire to access ORACLE data from several in house servers. Users can view over 100 different map layers which are integrated with scanned documents, and data from the county’s assessors office and the city’s main database server. The MapGuide server uses dual 450 Mhz Pentium III's, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB internal SCSI drive, 120 GB external SCSI disk for orthophotos, Windows NT 4 server, and Mapguide 4.

Much of the website’s functionality is “out of the box” and has been developed with several key elements in mind; ease of use, stability, delivers existing vector map data, simple for end users to navigate. Lloyd and Dickinson demonstrated the ease of use of the County’s website in an excellent presentation. They walked us through live examples of how the public can use the site to quickly and easily perform spatial selections to produce mailing lists, access scanned survey documents, view aerial photography, and access geodetic control files. The only requirement of the end user being a web browser and an image viewing tool (plug-in) to access TIF raster files. Here are some screen captures we made during the demo.

Zoom-Go-To Example

Sanitary Sewer Layer

Geodedic control Data

Aerial Photography Backdrop

Pima County has had nothing but positive feedback from the public regarding the website, and traffic has increased steadily every month since the site went live. Last month alone there were over 164,000 requests made to the MapGuide server, with requests mostly coming from County employees, other government users, engineering companies, real estate professionals, and the general public.

You can contact Jack Lloyd at jlloyd@dot.co.pima.az.us and John Dickinson at jdickins@dot.co.pima.az.us

The Pima County Map Server can be accessed at www.dot.co.pima.az.us

Article by Glenn Letham, editor
SpatialNews and The GeoCommunity
editor@geocomm.com