Our Work: GIS Environment Upgrade

The City of Corvallis used geospatial data to support daily tasks by internal staff and the public. For a long time, these needs could be met using file-based datasets (Esri shapefiles) and disconnected tools.

However, when the City began implementing some new enterprise applications, the existing geographic information system (GIS) infrastructure couldn't integrate with them.

The City needed to upgrade its GIS environment and create a central repository to better manage its spatial data.

The Solution

The City of Corvallis contracted with Resource Data to

  • Analyze its current GIS infrastructure
  • Define requirements for an upgrade
  • Design and implement a new geodatabase and enterprise GIS environment, with development, production, and publishing servers

The new enterprise GIS integrates with the City’s business systems and also provides new functionality, such as a versioning and auditing data changes via archiving and editor tracking.

In addition, the environment also continues to support needed legacy systems and processes. For example, to distribute data to legacy systems, needed datasets are automatically exported (in 4 formats) from the geodatabase and published to FTP. In addition, users can import data modified by legacy applications into the centralized geodatabase.

Our Approach

To complete the analysis and design, we reviewed and analyzed the City’s existing business processes, workflows, infrastructure, applications, and data. We also considered functionality and processes that the existing GIS environment didn’t support.

Based on this analysis, we documented requirements and designed the new database schema and GIS environment. During this process, we also recommended new or changed workflows that would take advantage of functionality in ArcGIS Server and ArcSDE.

After the City approved the design, we collaborated closely with the City to implement the geodatabase and GIS environment. This work included installing, configuring, and deploying ArcGIS and ArcSDE servers. We also assisted in loading data into the new geodatabase.