An intuitive interface for GIS application development

Overview
Palo Alto, home of Stanford University and numerous spin-off research companies, is located at the “head” of California’s Silicon Valley. The city’s upper-income, highly educated citizens demand responsive city services. Fortunately, the city’s early decision to own its utilities has provided an income stream to meet the demands of its citizens.

Nearly $25 million is budgeted annually for utility infrastructure replacement including lining sewer pipes, replacing water lines, undergrounding overhead electric lines, installing fiber optic cables, improving natural gas lines, and extending the storm drainage system. On top of this, city leaders have seen the wisdom to taking a true ll~ecycle approach to maintaining other infrastructure assets such as streets, public buildings, public safety facilities and parks. This means a high priority (and additional budget dollars) will be allocated to the infrastructure - making GIS’s function as a tool for infrastructure management all the more attractive. Palo Alto has created a high-accuracy map base to manage its utilities and to maintain its streets and storm drains. The geographic information system (GIS) data base has been constructed from many sources to serve a growing and diverse set of user applications Ten years ago the foundation for this project was formed through needs assessments, feasibility studies, acquisition of initial hardware (Digital Equipment VAX workstations) and software (Graphic Design Systems GIS software and Oracle RDBMS). Following a prototype mapping project, detailed specifications for citywide mapping were developed together with an extensive data model. The city was then well prepared to embark on a contract to map its entire 25 square miles and all its myriad features.

Two years ago the city was at a crossroads, facing decisions that would have far reaching implications for acceptance and utilization of this high profile system. To maximize the utilization of the very large investment in GIS the application environment needed to present the users with an intuitive interface. What environment should be chosen so that users would be comfortable and yet was powerful enough for managing the sometimes complex elements of the infrastructure? The answer was not at all obvious and required considerable analysis and debate. This paper documents the decision criteria and key issues leading to the application development approach.