In-house GIS Applications

Two years in the making, the Development Tracking System tracks every application submitted to the Planning Division. These applications are to change the city's face in some way. Applicants use this process to request a change in zoning requirements or restrictions, submit site plans or plats, apply for a conditional use permit, or amend the General Plan.

The Development Tracking System used to harness the power of ArcObjects 8.2, but now uses MapObjects 2.4 to make it more distributable to city employees. Practically everything stored in the Tracking System can be accessed on-line at http://www.orem.org/DTS/DevTrackWeb.dll.

Three weeks in the making, this MapObjects-based application tracks the millions of dollars of arbor assets owned by the city. TreeGIS makes tree asset maintenance a breeze. Interactive reports and integrity checks allow for easy error clean-up. Tree information can also be exported to HTML files for easy sharing. An on-board tree value calculator allows the user to calculate tree values for trees not owned by the city.

Orem has written several database applications which access information on an IBM i-Series. Some of these applications need to verify city addresses before they proceed with a certain operation. The i-Series hosts an AS/400 operating system which is not natively accessed by ArcGIS or MapObjects. The Address Hive was built to link our parcel geodatabase with an i-Series database of addresses. With our address database getting more and more out-of-date, we needed to develop a solution which would keep these addresses in sync with our GIS. Now that this has been accomplished with the Hive, we can query which addresses are in a certain administrative boundary, for example. The addresses can also be quickly modified by the Hive when an administrative boundary changes its borders. Users can also get a sense of which addresses are close to each other using the interactive map.

Click here to view a set of commands that were developed to quickly add new addresses to the Hive straight from ArcMap. After clicking the link, scroll down to the section named ArcHiveCommands.dll.

Until recently, Development Services and Public Works have had to rely on exact addresses for work permits issued by the city. If someone applied for a permit to work on 842 N State Street and someone called in wanting to know what was being done at about 850 N State Street, chances were slim that we would find it in our database.

With the new Engineering Permit Program, permits are plotted on-the-fly so that they can be spatially queried and located. Now, exact addresses don't matter so much. Our secretaries draw a rectangle on the map, and all permits issued in that area from the last five years are put into a report.