Project Profile City of Houston, TX Project Overview The City of Houston Planning Department is the primary caretaker of the Houston area GIS data. Although the city encompasses 622 square miles with over 560,000 parcels, the project encompasses over 2,000 square miles and 1.2 million parcels due to the Extra Territorial Jurisdiction (ETJ) buffer area. They are using a mixture of Arc/Info, MetaMAP and Synercom. Their data resides on a MicroVAX 3800 and is accessed through several network protocols. They utilize over 25 MetaMAP workstations to accomplish a variety of tasks. MetaMAP Solutions After testing the three platforms in house, MetaMAP was determined to be the system of choice for basic GIS database maintenance. The reasons were speed, ease of use, low hardware costs, efficient use of network resources, as well as the capability of the product. The Planning Department uses MetaMAP extensively for their "land use" polygon mapping maintenance and plotting. MetaMAP is used for "heads up" digitizing from digital orthophotography for base map updates. The director of the City Emergency Management Team uses MetaMAP's efficient data structure to carry an entire City GIS database on his laptop for on-site incident management. The solid waste management division of the city uses MetaMAP to obtain house counts for the purpose of load balancing, as well as general plotting. The traffic and transportation department uses MetaMAP for their street hump and street closure data maintenance. MetaMAP's address lookup and plotting capabilities are also used extensively by this department. MetaMAP's data translators are used to exchange data with other in house, and out of house systems, specifically Arc/Info. Contact Stan Watson City of Houston Planning Department 1801 Main Street, 3rd Floor Houston, TX 77002 713-754-0441 |
