Municipal Asset Management Using GIS and Internet Mapping – The Atlanta Story

Abstract

The City of Atlanta has contracted the Program Management Team (PMT) under Clean Water Atlanta Program (CWA) to assist them with compliance to a Consent Decree, issued by the U.S Department of Justice in 1999, to reduce the number of overflows from their collection system. PMT is comprised of a joint venture -Montgomery Watson-Harza and KHAFRA, as well as numerous sub-contractors. This paper will focus on how enterprise web-based mapping tools can dramatically change and improve the method in which cities conduct day-to-day wastewater operations and hopefully, aid in compliance to the Consent Decree.Working side by side with Watershed Management, Engineering Information System Division, KHAFRA was tasked with building an enterprise-wide GIS system. In an effort to improve the city's mapping system CADD based sewer drawings were converted to a GIS format therefore transforming a purely graphical representation of the city's collection system to a multi-dimensional information based system. These data are stored in an Oracle database and accessed through ESRI's Spatial Database Engine (SDE). Enterprise-wide GIS is a term used to indicate that many different users can access and update a GIS database simultaneously without loss of information or corruption of datasets. This becomes very important in large organizations for the reason that other departments can have access to and assist with maintaining different datasets used in the Geographic Information System. KHAFRA has also implemented a system, whereby this GIS information can be accessed/distributed via customized Internet Mapping interfaces and web-based tools. This effort allows every employee access to the GIS information, through their web browser, without requiring the user to load and maintain expensive, sometimes complicated, GIS software on their personal computer system. Since users with various skill sets and requirements have a need to access mapping information each site is customized with the target user in mind. The Internet Mapping sites vary in complexity, starting from a very basic location querying tool and progressing to a much more complex interactive, analytical tool. In addition, techniques were developed to automatically upload data to the Hansen Work Management system from the GIS. Field InputThis site was designed by the CWA GIS group to allow people who work in the field a method to graphically communicate information to the GIS team. It works much the same as the manhole and street search however it contains an extra tool that allows the user to depict a feature or problem by drawing or sketching on top of the map ( Figure 16). This modification or sketch is captured as a .JPEG image and is automatically emailed to the GIS team ( Figure 17). This tool is useful for people performing work on the sewer line