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The GIS house that Sheffield built A Housing first
Two years ago a seemingly simple question about a piece of land could often
prove the most difficult for the Strategic Initiatives (SI) department of Sheffield
City Council’s Housing Services Section to answer.With over
13 years worth of site-related information available for the city of Sheffield,
lack of information was not SI department personnel’s problem – it
was the
storage and maintenance of that significant knowledge.
Predominantly driven by a scattered, paper-based environment, personnel
found it difficult to respond efficiently to common queries such as the
ownership or potential land use of a particular plot.They were simple
questions, but because the SI section lacked a central repository of land-related
information about sites across Sheffield, providing simple and exact answers
hasn’t been easy.
However, with the recent implementation by Autodesk Professional Services
of a Webbased GIS driven by Autodesk’s MapGuide, life is now very different
for not only SI personnel but other Council staff as well.
An approach that marries the spatial data management strength of a GIS
and the openness of a distributed network, SI’s Land Survey System
is displacing
the Housing Services’ laborious tradition in collecting, recording
and
maintaining site-related information with simple exercises in keystrokes.
Razing an old tradition
The SI section has been surveying and
assessing the development health of
potential regeneration” sites – vacant or
derelict land – throughout the city of Sheffield since 1990. Predominantly
Councilowned land, the sites could be
derelict old schools or undeveloped
vacant lots. At regular intervals, SI
personnel visit the sites, survey them and
record their prospects for potential
development.At present, the SI section
has a list of about 1,500 plots of land in
the city that need to be inspected to
judge their suitability as regeneration
sites.To date, SI staff has surveyed 500 of
them.
Although the procedure for physically
surveying sites was systematic – staff
went into the field with a standard form
to record information – the process for
storing and maintaining collected
information was not.Adopting a rather
ad-hoc approach to managing data,
site-related information was held on
paper documents and within the
memories of individual personnel across
several departments. Although
departments were eager to share data
with other colleagues, the isolated
pockets of data stores made it difficult to
distribute information and to keep
data current.With requests for information
both to and from the SI section increasing,
it became evident that a more dynamic
and interactive information management
system was needed.“ We realized both that a more systematic
and updateable means of storing,
retrieving and presenting the information
was required,” explains Gary Hunt, a
project officer and GIS development
project manager with the SI.“Additionally
a more strategic approach to recording
and sharing information about land sites
was required. A GIS-based system was
the obvious method.”
Sheffield City Council
In 2000 research began to design a
system
to serve the Housing Services needs.The
department needed an effective tool to
help personnel respond efficiently to
requests for information regarding
potential housing development/regeneration
sites as well as the status of the
land, and to enable them to access easily
data from other critical departments such
as planning.
Of particular importance,given the
distributed personnel infrastructure of
the Council,was to have a system that
would allow Housing Services to share
informationwith colleagues in remote
offices – specifically those in the Area
Housing Offices, a set of 10 local offices
across Sheffield dedicated to managing
Council-owned property.
With those objectives clearly in mind,
Hunt and colleagues identified that they
needed a web-based GIS. Such a system
would enable them to establish a central
database to store information about sites
across the city that are potentially
developable for housing and regeneration,
to import data from other sections to
enhance the judgments made on these
sites and to open the database up to
remote colleagues to access needed
information themselves.
After two years of research conducted by
the Council’s chief GIS officer of several
products on the market, the SI section
chose Autodesk’s MapGuide, a software
suite that allows users to create,
publish,view and distribute maps and
map-related content over an intranet or
Internet, and Autodesk Professional
Services, to pioneer its Land Survey
System.The first Web-enabled application
of its kind in the Council, the Land Survey
System went live in May 2003.
Plotting the solution
Although still in its “infancy”, Housing
Services personnel have already seen
tremendous benefit from the Land
Survey System in the short six months it’s
been operational.The implementation by
Autodesk Professional Services has
delivered on time and budget the
MapGuide based solution, so that SI
personnel can now approach the process
of surveying, recording and managing
regeneration sites with more geographic
savvy.As addresses of potential sites
come in from the Planning Department,
SI personnel can plot the locations on the
Land Survey System’s basemap, enabling
them to better plan survey schedules.
And once surveys are completed, instead
of placing the paper form in a ring
binder, they can input the collected
information directly into the map
database, drawing a graphical boundary
of the site onto the basemap and
attaching its relevant attributes to it.
Handling common requests regarding
housing development potential and land
ownership and land use more is now
much easier for SI staff.No longer needing
to sift through ring binders of paper or
hunt for colleagues who may have had
experience with a certain site in the past,
personnel have reduced the responses to
requests for information on sites or for
specific maps from possibly days to a few
minutes. By opening up the GIS
information to other sections – particularly
staff in the Area Housing Offices - and
enabling staff to access and retrieve their
own information, SI personnel have seen
a sharp reduction in the number of
requests that come in. Historically, staff in
the Area Housing Offices would constantly
turn to SI personnel for information on
particular plots of land in their territory.
The availability of the MapGuide system
has enabled staff to package such data
into one open database and puts that
research power into their own hands.
In fact, with less time dedicated to
researching other requests, SI employees
have now become increasingly hungry
for information and are now more often
the requesters of information from Area
Housing Offices and the Planning
Department. In the past, for example, if SI
employees wanted to know if any
planning applications had been issued
for a certain site, they had to call the
department,who in turn would pass
them on until they found the appropriate
employee handling that application.With
the MapGuide system, personnel can
now immediately access the Planning
Departments’ information and discover
for themselves if a particular site has had
or currently has a pending planning
application. Requests still come into the
SI section but they’re of a different kind
now.As more and more colleagues learn
about the Land Survey System and the
information it holds, they are receive a
significant, and increasing, number of
requests to produce maps of sites or
districts for use in presentations or
reports. Previously such requests were
produced by copying and enhancing
paper-based Ordonnance Survey; now
perhaps two-thirds of such requests are
met by printing information off from the
MapGuide GIS system.“Autodesk was
invaluable in bringing our aims into
reality,”says Hunt.“We can now produce
more coherent and up-to-date
information about sites and land in
general.The provision of map information
and the ability to discuss data ‘live’ with other system users,
over the telephone or by email, is invaluable in
ascertaining the status and appropriate
use of land sites.” Requests for the future
Now that the GIS is in place, Hunt and
colleagues are continually adding items
to their “wish list”.Up first is to add an
aerial photo layer of the entire city to the
Land Survey System.They also plan to
enhance the search functionality of the
system to allow staff to perform more
detailed searches on specific addresses.
One wish that has already come true is
the MapGuide system finally provides
Housing Services personnel with the
tools to answer the simple questions
with a simple answer.
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