The tax assessor in a small northeastern town has seen a marked increase in the number of requests for property and tax records. Furthermore, with the town showing considerable growth in recent years, updating and managing this database has become more of a strain on the department. Paper tax maps are expensive to upgrade and changes are simply recorded as pencil notes on the original maps. With an increasing number of people using the paper maps, they have become damaged and difficult to read. What this town needs is a Geographic Information System, however traditional GIS software is expensive and hard to use.
Solution:
XMap 5.0 GIS Enterprise offers all of the spatial tools that most prospective GIS users will need at a fraction of the cost of other GIS products. XMap 5.0 includes support for MrSID files enabling municipal officials to tap into the state’s library of high-resolution aerial imagery. Using the multi-point image registration tool, scanned paper maps are imported and rendered as a raster data layer with the background masked to expose the underlying image. The resulting combination of map and aerial image is traced to create a digital framework to which tax records are linked. Custom queries are then built to highlight the properties that match the specific parameters of the requester. This layer is then published to the town’s XMap Web site offering residents quick and easy access to the town’s property information. The tax department quickly saw a return on their investment in XMap 5.0 GIS Enterprise as workflow became more efficient and staff were able to perform other vital tasks.
Built With:
XMap 5.0 GIS Enterprise
BaseMap:
High-resolution aerial imagery in MrSID format
User Additions:
Raster layer derived from scanned and registered tax map Vector layer derived from tracing the raster map
;)