Melbourne’s spatially-enabled city management system won top honours in Victoria’s annual Spatial Excellence Awards.
The system, known as Compass, combines and integrates location-based information with the latest mapping, aerial and ground-level imagery and geospatial information technology into a single system that can be accessed by council staff and registered users.
It is used by City of Melbourne staff to handle a wide range of council activities including town planning, rate assessment, parking matters, dealing with customer requests and queries daily, and helping maintain the hundreds of thousands of assets the city has both above and below ground.
It is fully integrated with the City of Melbourne’s property and asset systems as well as the council’s extensive archive of current and historic aerial imagery and ground level photographs.
City of Melbourne team leader GIS, David Hassett, said the system helps the city manage more than 340 km of roads and streets, a huge underground network of stormwater drains and thousands of above-ground city assets like trees, garden areas, street signs, light poles, seats, and other items.
“It’s a giant management task and the precise location of each of these features and assets is vitally important in enabling us to manage city activities and deal efficiently with any issue that arises,” he said.
The system is also integrated with a range of external applications such as Pictometry, Nearmap, Google Street View and Google Earth, which enables users to visualise a scene, including the ability to view the City of Melbourne’s 3D model of the city.
The spatial excellence awards are given annually by the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute (SSSI) and the Spatial Information Business Association (SIBA).
Other winners this year include a management system designed for a boutique cemetery in New York, Victoria’s controversial Sugarloaf Pipeline project, an emergency marker system for Victoria’s parklands and open areas, a new smart-phone based system for Dial Before U Dig services, and a highly-accurate, high-resolution soil dataset for 30,000 square kilometres of Victoria’s Mallee region.
