April/May 2009 Updates
Welcome new subscribers! Many of you are receiving this message by email, we are excited you have subscribed and are participating that way.
Thanks to those of you who have been using our latest websites and providing us with much needed feedback. This is a product of your needs and requests (both recent and cumulative from years past). Please continue to email us with stories of how you are using our new GIS web tools and your wish list.
We encourage you to give our new training videos a look and begin learning the many exciting features of our GIS Websites. There is a 2 minute ‘quick start’ and a more in-depth 5min video demonstrating more features. (give them a look)
There have been a couple attempts to revise our county web page (www.yorkcountygov.com/GIS) so that everyone can continue to find the old website while previewing and learning the new sites. Until everyone is comfortable with our new sites (specifically the new ‘basic’ search which is under development) we will leave the old GIS Online for everyone to continue using. Change is not easy, we want to make the switchover and retirement of the old sites as painless as possible over the next year.
April and May 2009 have been a productive months! We upgraded to ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 the first week of May and have been noticing how much more quickly our dynamic maps are rendered. In June we plan on moving our map caches to a location on our big disk drive (SAN) that spins faster and has proven (in testing) to more quickly render the vector base map tiles (parcels, roads, address map features).
Essentials map with POL Navigator split screen
York County acquired oblique and ortho imagery in 2009. The oblique Pictometry imagery arrived and we will be delivering that through the latest websites as a split screen later this year (see image). Many staff have already started using Pictometry through their desktop EFS product. The orthophotography project should wrap up at and be available by July.
Also completed in May was a rewrite of our searches to query related records. What does this mean? For around 2,700 parcels there are buildings that have parcel numbers but no associated land. There are also physical addresses associated with each parcel. Our updated searches now query these related records and display information in a window to the right of the land parcel selected.
Essentials 1521 with Situs Address(es)
The example shown here (click image to view larger) is for Winthrop University with numerous physical addresses onsite. For the address we are able to provide information such as council district representation, school district, county zoning, water/electric/fire district and census tract.
There will be a revised “Property Report” released soon that will also display these related records.
Also, a number of searches have been added. Plan Tracking projects can be queried by name and project number. Watersheds (name and HUC#), Adopt-a-Highway, search by Route # (county road numbers), Previous Owner, Deed/Plat Book-Page, . The ability to see driving time (geoprocessing task) in 5, 10 and 15 minute areas from any location is available also.
One of the last items we are hoping to implement later in 2009 is data extract. This should bring the ‘old’ and ‘new’ into feature parity. Many users are reporting they have more scenarios where they are able to use the new tools found in the website, so we are excited to hear how many additional types of inquiries are conducted with the new GIS Online.