Watch out, Mickey Mouse! Disney World is no longer the only place to find the city of the future. In fact, there's another one just up the road in Jacksonville, Fla. It may not have an enchanted castle or a monorail, but Jacksonville and many other cities are achieving a level of integrated engineering that had previously existed only in the minds of people like Walt Disney...and possibly a few forward-thinking civil engineers.
      From the civil engineering perspective, the city of the future is one in which all planning, design, operations and administration are conducted from a single integrated digital environment, explained Mark Eustis, senior manager of GIS sales and development for Ashtech, a developer of GPS products.
      In such a place, all municipal projects are coordinated because every department works off the same basemaps and shares common information. Cooperation is maximized and expensive duplication of work is minimized. And the GeoTechnologies are making it possible.
      "With the combination of GPS, GIS and related GeoTechnologies, the civil engineer or city manager has the tools to understand their city on a broad scale," said Eustis. "The real key is in the integration between operations and the availability of consistently accurate, precisely located asset inventories."
     The GeoTechnology that is primarily responsible for making the city of the future a reality falls under the catch-phrase "enterprise-wide GIS." Stated simply, this means the GIS has been networked extensively through all city departments so they share the same basemaps and database information.
      "Ultimately, the result of all this is better service for the citizen," said Eustis, "and it's more cost-effective, too."
      Jacksonville is just one of several cities and counties that have recently implemented GISs and found that networking many departments on the system via a distributed server network is the most efficient and cost-effective approach. The Jacksonville GIS serves seven departments: public works, planning & development, property appraisal, fire & rescue, sheriff, public utility, and regulatory & environmental.
      The first step in implementing an enterprise-wide GIS is choosing a standard map scale and coordinate system that all the basemaps will use, advised George McGregor, GIS manager in Jacksonville's public works department. That allows the information from every department, whether it's sewer pipes or roadways, to be overlaid on each other for accurate analysis of geographic relationships.
     Jacksonville developed two layers of basemaps, which together contain all of the information necessary for any civil engineering project. The first contains road centerlines and addresses, and the second holds the property parcel information.
      In a distributed server network such as Jacksonville's, the ARC/INFO GIS software resides on computers in each participating city department. Every server has a copy of the same basemap files, but each department is responsible for maintaining and updating its own database files. For example, the utility department has digital maps of all water and sewer lines in its database, while the property appraisal office has road right-of-way information.
     If a new road construction project was called for, the planning & development office can access the other databases and pull elements from each into its own server to plan the new roadway.
     There is a limit to database access, noted McGregor. The GIS provides a lockout mechanism so that certain sensitive files, such as crime information in the sheriff's office, can't be shared.
      Six of Jacksonville's seven GIS departments are located within ten blocks of each other, allowing for computer networking via a fiber optic cable. The regulatory & environment office is too far for fiber optics, and it accesses the other servers via a telephone line.
      The next phase of GIS development in Jacksonville is to improve interaction among the databases in the various departments. McGregor explained that under current capabilities when public works is preparing to build a roadway, it will query the utility database to find locations of buried pipes. In the future though, Jacksonville wants this database interaction to occur automatically. For example, when the city's computer-aided dispatch sends an ambulance in response to an emergency, the dispatch database will automatically search the public works department's construction maps and notify the vehicle of possible construction detours on its route.
     Another big step for the city of the future is convincing local developers to get involved with the GIS. Jacksonville soon will request real estate developers to file with the city digital maps of new communities planned or under construction. This information will be directly input into the GIS so the city can update its maps. The developer will benefit too, because the city will respond more quickly to provide the utility and other services required by the new community.
     Jacksonville avoided the turf wars often associated with multi-departmental projects, especially those that involve information sharing, by funding the project through a single GIS budget instead of seven departmental budgets.
      "When we made a decision to implement a certain part of the GIS, there was no squabbling about whose budget the money would come from," said McGregor, adding that this unified approach accelerated the GIS development process.

Assisting Engineers at Every Level
A civil engineer doesn't have to work in the planning office of a big city to take advantage of GIS functionality. Steve Beck, GIS coordinator for KCI Technologies of Hunt Valley, Md., sees GIS improving civil engineering projects at all levels.
      "The biggest impact of GIS [in civil engineering] is that it integrates planning and design processes," said Beck, explaining that in his office the environmental scientists are mapping floodplains, historic sites and wetlands on the same basemap the engineers are using to lay out new road alignments.
      This allows a synergy between the two functions that didn't exist before. The designer can conduct numerous "what if" models right on the GIS to see how various road designs will impact environmentally sensitive areas or cultural features. And managers can exercise greater budget control by adding financial data to the model so that a price tag is attached to each design based on the value of land it crosses or the type of construction material that may be required.
      Civil engineers agree the GIS environment is ideal for putting design projects in the context of their surroundings, but many still prefer to conduct the actual design in AutoCAD, a computer-aided design package. While the debate over the respective pros and cons of GIS and CAD continue, some companies have decided to bridge the gap.
      Genasys of Fort Collins, Colo., developed a package called GenaCivil that lets the CAD user operate in the GIS environment. This has streamlined the design process, explained John Nicholson of Genasys, because it lets the CAD user perform spatial analysis calculations in the GIS instead of manually outside the system.
      SoftDesk Inc. of Troy, N.Y. has taken the opposite approach by bringing GIS functionality to AutoCAD. The software company has developed a full line of modules that allow civil engineers to integrate spatial data analysis into the CAD environment. With these packages, engineers can import aerial photos, satellite images and digital terrain models for incorporation into CAD design functions.

GIS Mapping Relies on GPS
Although GIS technology receives top billing in civil engineering applications, it is supported by several other GeoTechnologies. In fact, without the accuracy provided by GPS in most basemaps, GIS may not have been so readily accepted by civil engineers, according to Ed Crane, director of business development at M.J. Harden in Kansas City, Miss.
      Early GIS developers learned the hard way that a GIS is only as accurate as the basemap on which it is built, explained Crane. He noted that nearly every city and county now using aerial photography to create GIS basemaps is insisting on ground control point collection with GPS.
      Aside from locating ground control, civil engineers are using GPS to locate city assets such as street signs, light poles and man-hole covers with accuracy down to a centimeter. And using the GPS is easier than ever before.
      Imagine standing on a man-hole cover in a busy street to get an accurate GPS fix. Laser Technology Inc. of Englewood, Colo., has developed a laser-based mapping system that eliminates the need for a GPS survey crew to occupy the actual feature whose location is being determined. With the laser, the survey crew can stand safely on a street corner and fire the laser to calculate the distance to the cover. They then fire the laser at a nearby GPS base station and determine the cover's location relative to the GPS. Later the files are merged to attach an absolute location to the man-hole cover.

Bringing Imagery to Micro Level
The satellite remote sensing industry has not forgotten about the civil engineers. In fact, developers of high-resolution satellites are aiming right at the civil engineers who now use aerial photographs for their mapping, planning and management projects. Space Imaging Corp. of Sunnyvale, Calif. and EarthWatch of Boulder, Colo., each have high resolution satellites planned to tap into this market.
       The Space Imaging system will offer one-meter imaging, and EarthWatch will provide three-meter imagery. Both will have multispectral capability.
       The availability of both multispectral and high-resolution imagery from the same system will make project planning more efficient, said KCI's Steve Beck. In planning a highway, for instance, multispectral satellite imagery is required for land use analysis, and aerial photos are required for small-scale feature mapping. Soon both will be accomplished with one data set.
      These high-resolution systems will bring satellite imagery to a larger group of civil engineering users, said John Chadwick, a remote sensing specialist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Remote Sensing/GIS Center in Hanover, N.H. Satellite image use in civil engineering will move toward a more detailed level of planning. For example, where once a city planner may have used imagery to lay out parks in a city, a park planner may soon use it to lay out the flower beds in the park.
      Chadwick noted that remote sensing contributions in civil engineering are not limited to these sensors with high-resolution. Space shuttle radar and airborne synthetic aperture radar for interferometric derivation of elevation are showing great promise in engineering applications at Corps laboratories. Additionally, NASA's planned experimental hyperspectral satellite, Lewis, may prove the best new tool for civil engineers in land use and land cover analysis projects.

About the author :
Kevin P. Corbley is the principal in Corbley Communications, which provides PR and marketing services to remote sensing, GIS and GPS companies. He is located in Denver, Colo., and may be reached at 303-750-8011 or via E-mail at "[email protected]".

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