Christchurch City Council (CCC) recently received the Association of Local Government Information Management (ALGIM) GIS Project of the Year Award. CCC received the award for implementing an innovative GIS solution in response to the devastating earthquake that took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, on February 22, 2011.
Christchurch City Council is New Zealand’s second-largest local government authority responsible for nearly 370,000 residents. A long-term Intergraph user, Christchurch City Council has implemented a suite of Intergraph solutions for managing and sharing up-to-date infrastructure services data with key stakeholders after the earthquake.
The serious level of damage from the earthquakes required solutions for managing the growing volumes of spatial data requests. Christchurch City Council needed to free up staff resources by removing any manual processes for data management and dissemination. The organisation created a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) using web feature service (WFS) technology to make feeds of geospatial data continuously available to the various contracting organisations involved in quake recovery work.
“The ‘old’ pre-quake process was very cumbersome, time-consuming and involved outputting snapshots of datasets into various formats, burning them to a CD or DVD and sharing them with many parties,” said Kyle Dow, Senior Data Analyst, Corporate Data Team, Christchurch City Council.
“This new implementation allowed us to share spatial data several times a day with minimal use of staff time, allowing us to free up our resources for other critical needs.”
Through the use of a comprehensive product site license, the Christchurch City Council has a wide range of Intergraph geospatial products they can use including GeoMedia, GeoMedia WebMap and GeoMedia SDI Pro. In addition, Intergraph donated local support services, as well as provided a global expert from its Canada office to help implement the SDI services functions of GeoMedia WebMap.
“In light of this tragedy, we are glad that we were able to support the response of the devastating earthquake in New Zealand last year,” said Stephen Willson, New Zealand Country Manager, Intergraph Corporation. “We would like to congratulate the Christchurch City Council for winning the ALGIM GIS Project of the Year Award. The demands of the quake response have been huge on all staff at CCC, and this is deserved recognition of their efforts to deploy web services technology to speed up the quake recovery process.”
The Christchurch City Council is now using this solution on a daily basis for increased efficiencies when sharing geospatial data with key stakeholders. Steps are also underway to stand up a Transactional WFS (WFS-T) to provide a read/write capability to and from external agencies.
