Infrastructure and Management Spatial Information Management in the City of Saint Paul

Spatial data use at a glance We are: The City of Saint Paul, which includes all of the infrastructure within the public Right-of-way. We use: Spatial tools for Infrastructure Maintenance Management tasks. The “bad”: Data that is: hard to find and/or it’s out of date. We can: Share now, are setup, ready and willing to partner with other spatial data owners to provide the same capabilities at a regional level (and beyond?). The “good”: Easy to find and up to date.

The City of Saint Paul SECTION 1 - We are...

Some of the (main) City tasks Only 56 sq. mi., but densely developed. –Management of public Right-of-way (non taxed areas). –Management of Parcel information and Addressing. Infrastructure Maintenance Management tasks. –Data is sourced from: Public Works, Safety and Inspections, Planning and Economic Development, Parks & Rec., Office of Technology, Fire, Police, Real Estate, and District Councils. Planning, Engineering tasks and Code enforcement. –Planning: Research, Ownership, Zoning. –Engineering: Visualization, Design and Build processes. –Code Enforcement: Licensing, Permitting.

Spatial Data For... SECTION 2 – We use... Street Centerlines Property or Survey Lines Right-of-way Corridor Contour Lines Sanitary Sewer Storm Sewers Address Points Parking Meters Lighting Traffic Signs Planimetrics (Physical Structures) In other words Keeping track of a lot of stuff !

Discussion points on data access: Data publishing. –Internal access, 220 layers. –External access, 58 layers. –10 to 15 layers in development at any one time. –A new layer published every 3 – 4 weeks. Management and upkeep of datasets. –27 Live Database connections, –21 Raster layers, mostly aerials, dating to the 1940s –31 infrastructure layers. Data harvesting. –19 WMS Services, from other agencies and government units.

Example Dataset(s) 851 miles of Streets 1,254 miles of Sewers 31,806 Street Lights 1,007 miles of sidewalks 331 Bridges 385 Signals 26,100 Catch Basins. 31,806 Street Lights

Example Dataset Data Repository –Secured and Shared Folder system of publishing. –Contains data and display configuration files. Data Custodians –Are generally, the owner / authors of the datasets, or data maintenance assignee. –Cartography and frequency of updating. Publishing –Publishing Classes (Internal only, External, etc) –Simplified metadata required for publishing. –Contact for reporting of errors or omissions.

Bringing it all together

Open source software –Provides a very high level of flexibility for creation and customization of the software. Our Spatial discovery tool is called GISmo. –Which uses the GeoMoose open source project. –GeoMoose originated at the City. The GISmo data catalog and tools are fed into more than just the Web Browser. –The GISmo data feeds all of the 90+ AutoCAD workstations in the City, ESRI clients, other City databases (Addressing, etc), QuantumGIS, Google Earth and Google Maps, to name a few.

Successes. SECTION 3(a) – The good... You can trust what’s in GISmo. It’s been going Strong since Data owners take Responsibility. Open Source = Flexibility !

Successes. Trust in the System and the data authors. Has lead to continued success. Contributions of data for Publishing. Eased many previously labor intensive processes. Owners of data sets are taking responsibility for their data. In many cases the data was always there and updated, just not in a form for general reuse. The Open Source toolsets have allowed us a very high level of flexibility to respond to users.

Problems. SECTION 3(b) – The bad... Some datasets still don’t have a custodian for publishing. Some features that could be added The system is becoming dated.

Problems. What problems? Still those data owners not seeing the benefits of publishing to the masses. Still some data sets available, but without a custodian to maintain. Still some labor intensive tasks that could be streamlined with a better system development team in place. System is getting old and replacement is being planned.

Share Information. SECTION 4(a) – We can...

We are sharing now. The GISmo system of tools is already sharing data. All of our published data, internal as well as external, is available as a WMS service (map overlays). Where appropriate, selected datasets are also available as WFS layers (as features). Some layers need to be protected from prying eyes for security or contractual reasons. Publishing of the restricted datasets requires more administrative effort, but it is configurable.

Do more Sharing. SECTION 4(b) – We want to...

We want to do more. We want to share more of our data and toolsets. We want access to more data from other agencies. We need a method of securing sensitive datasets with an easy to use administrative interface. Need to make it work across regional areas for other agencies and units of government.

What are you willing to do? We’re ready to work with outside agencies to build out these capabilities for the region (and beyond?) The entire system described here can be configured in a portable manner (except for a couple of databases). The current system is configured in a nodal form, and more nodes of information can be added. This allows for the distributed maintenance of data, while also allowing for a centralized publishing. Are you (collectively,) ready to rumble?... work towards the common good?

Point Clouds (Street Level)

Point Clouds >> Model

Point Clouds (Street Level)

Done. Bob Basques GIS Systems Developer City of Saint Paul, Public Works, Technical Services