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Spotsylvania's GIS Day Technology Fair shows off powerful mapping applications Date published: 11/20/2007 By Jonas Beals Jonas Beals When Spotsylvania County received a questionable electricity bill from Dominion Virginia Power, the county's geographic information system was called into service. The streetlight map from Dominion was overlaid on the map of county property. It turned out that, of the lights the county was being billed for, many weren't even on county property. With the click of a mouse, the GIS had saved the county $25,000. A GIS system is a database made visual. Any information that can be related to a map is collected and stored digitally. That information can then be graphically displayed on the map, giving the user the ability to selectively view the data to see how it relates to the physical world. Information from soil type to murder rate can be displayed on a map, in an instant. John Ferketic, the GIS manager for Spotsylvania, has seen a shift in the focus of his department. "We've made a lot of progress as a county in GIS over the last couple of years," he said. "We've switched from being mapmakers to being technologists." Much of the work done by the GIS division these days is analytical in nature. It is able to use the technology to answer questions for other county departments. For instance, adult businesses are highly restricted in the county. The question arose as to where, exactly, an adult business could locate in Spotsylvania. Using GIS information on zoning, churches, schools and home locations, the division was able to represent potential adult-business sites as purple flecks on a county map. As with most technology these days, the future of GIS is interactivity. The Department of Information Services has been working closely with other departments to integrate the GIS into their operations. Spotsylvania's Utilities Department now has digitized maps of the water and sewer system--nearly 10,000 paper maps condensed onto a hard drive. Utility workers can take those maps into the field on a laptop. What's more, their computers are linked to the Global Positioning System, so when a worker opens the GIS the map automatically focuses on his exact location. The Utilities Department is also integrating repair-history data with the maps. "We're barely scratching the surface of its capability," said Henry Washington, a department employee.
Read more stories about Spotsylvania Date published: 11/20/2007
My first encounter with GIS was not quite so rosy. My company uses this so-called tool and so a client was almost charged about $200 more on an insurance policy since GIS reported that his house was in Caroline County rather than Spotsy. Their printed interpretation of the actual map which by itself was quite clear, was dead wrong. My client was greatly relieved to find out that he had not paid taes to the wrong county for the last few years. We used Mapquest and Google maps to discover the error!
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