GIS system conversion gets a boost

  • By Sharon Haught of the Wooster Weekly News
  • October 12, 2009
  • 753
                        
41,000 down. 18,000 to go. That’s the word from the Wayne County auditor’s department on the progress of their ongoing efforts to convert the 59,000 individual parcels of land that comprise Wayne County into an electronic database that could soon be accessible to everyone via the Internet, perhaps through a subscription service. The department’s efforts will get a boost if it is successful in obtaining a $62,400 grant from the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District to accelerate its efforts to place all the parcels into the GIS or Geographical Information System searchable database. “This is a grant that…will help facilitate and help to expedite finishing our parcel conversion,” Jarra Underwood, Wayne County auditor, informed the commissioners at their regular meeting Sept. 30. “Partnering with the Watershed, we can get the 18,000 left done more quickly so that we have a good base map,” said Underwood. “We are excited about the opportunity to bring this to fruition quicker.” With current information on the county’s 59,000 parcels of land in multiple formats, it’s been a major undertaking to convert all the data into a consistent format. According to Brian Hall, the auditor’s office GIS coordinator, “we’re touching every parcel in the county when we are building these parcels. “We go through all the surveys that the engineer has scanned into the system. We download those to our system and we basically take all these calls, bearings and distances and we place that parcel in,” said Hall. The process requires his department to individually rotate each piece of property to place the parcel into an overall map of the county in a format consistent with aerial photography collected in 2004. While the department is “trying to get this done as quickly as possible…one of the biggest things we have as far as a challenge is that our data is getting very popular and we have a lot of public requests come in on a regular basis,” said Hall, noting that when a request comes in the technicians have to set aside the conversion efforts to respond to the request. “We’ve been trying to do this within our office with the staff that we have. Continuing to do it as we are now would take at least a couple of years,” said Underwood. “We have people waiting to use GIS. It’s becoming more popular each and every day.” Hall noted that requests for GIS data come in on a daily basis from a wide variety of sources, including private businesses such as realtors and appraisers, as well as state and local government agencies. “Internally we have a number of departments that are using the data, the planning department being one for flood mitigation projects they are working on,” said Hall, noting that the soil and water and health departments are also using the data regularly. “Once the parcel layer is completed, it’s going to be a huge asset to those departments,” said Hall. Underwood noted that her department also works closely with cities and villages throughout the county and with local school districts who use GIS to route their busses. Fire and EMS are also currently using the system. “It’s live on laptops all the time with these departments that are using it for emergency response so it’s being used in a variety of ways,” said Underwood. Once the conversion efforts are complete, the department would like to be able to put the information online so that it can be accessed by all users via the Internet. “That is one of our biggest goals - to get it out there,” said Hall.


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