If you have ordered from your favorite food delivery service lately, you may have found yourself mesmerized by your delivery driver’s little map-car in the app. You watch with salivating anticipation as your delivery driver moved inch by inch from the restaurant to your home.
Now, if you are old enough to remember trying to get around an unfamiliar city reading an outdated multi-folded paper map, then you can certainly appreciate the work of the City of Huntsville’s GIS (geographic information systems) Office. They are celebrating 20 years of mapping every inch of the city so restaurants and thousands of other entities can incorporate geospatial data (GPS) into that GIS matrix making it easy to track and find any location quickly and efficiently – no paper map needed.
And that’s not all.
Whether you are looking for the nearest hair salon, school or the fastest route to the hospital, or searching for property availability to build a home or business, it is now easy to find what you are looking for.
GIS creates, manages, analyzes, and maps all types of data and connects it to a map, integrating location data with all types of descriptive information to provide a foundation for mapping and analysis that is used in science and almost every industry, including the day-to-day activities of everyday people.
As the City of Huntsville celebrates the 20th anniversary of their GIS Office, it is important to recognize how their work over the past two decades has changed your life – not just because Siri’s exacting voice provides an automatic co-pilot so you don’t have to pull over to consult a map, but because it can provide an immediate answer to everyday questions.
You can find the nearest government services like libraries, schools, parks, and post offices at the touch of an app and send the directions to your car phone or vehicle GPS before you leave the house.
If you are new to Huntsville, or even if you have been here awhile, GIS lets you see bike routes, City Council districts, arts and entertainment districts, greenways, flood zones and more.
You can track lost and found animals, find your trash pick-up and recycling days, and pinpoint public parking garages near your destination.
If it has a location in Madison County, the City GIS office has mapped it and made it available via mobile app to help you find things quickly and efficiently.
“Being on the cutting-edge of technology and working in a group of innovative people for the last 20 years has been a great experience,” said Amy Kenum, a graduate of the University of North Alabama who has led the City of Huntsville’s GIS office since its inception in 2002. “When the department was created, most people didn’t really know the capabilities that GIS could offer. Our department needed to show what we could accomplish. We all had to work together to create new data, develop new workflows and build applications.”
The office in fact started from scratch and it took nearly two years to release their first significant GIS project – a public online interactive map with aerial photos. Even before Google Maps was created a year later, City employees and residents used the City’s GIS mapping to view imagery and digital data of Huntsville for the first time.
“First announced to the public in 2004, the webpage has been through six versions and offers over 100 layers,” said Thomas McDonough, a GIS program specialist for the city. “It drastically reduced the number of phone calls and walk-ins to our office as well as the amount of paper our office consumes. We now have almost 100 webpages that are essential tools and time-savers for many.”
The GIS Office used reconciled addresses and data to create full databases for the City’s wastewater and stormwater systems; they digitally mapped every structure, road, sidewalk, driveway, pond, park, cemetery, bridge and thousands of other features in the city.
Today, GIS manages over 650 feature classes and has 90+ online applications, 64 that are available to the public.
The GIS Office also provides many online applications to help residents learn who their City Council representative is, for what is their home or business zoned, what type of soil is on their property, and to see what school zones they are in.
They can even look at historical maps and find specific cemetery plots.
The department has received numerous honors for its innovative work over the last 20 years. Among them are Special Achievement in GIS awards and recognition for assisting with specialized projects from the Huntsville-Madison County Emergency Management Agency, Community Development and the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Board.
“GIS is such a fast-changing technology that the sky really is the limit,” Kenum said. “In the next 10 years, I expect our GIS services and applications to continue to grow and become more advanced than ever before. With the support of Mayor Battle, department heads, and an innovative staff, I am very excited to see what our department develops next.”
Click here to view the GIS Department’s full gallery of apps.
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