
DATE: Friday, September 12, 1997            TAG: 9709120601

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY CINDY CLAYTON, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  120 lines

MAKING A MAP OF THE FUTURE A NEW DIGITAL MAPPING SYSTEM PUTS BIG PICTURE IN FOCUS FOR PLANNERS

Got something big in your back yard you don't want officials to see - a junk car maybe, or an unpermitted addition? Well, they can see it.

Already in some South Hampton Roads cities, officials have computer technology that can zoom in on a digitized image of your house, allowing them to see whether junkers are piling up, or if you have a vegetable garden - even where the shed is where you keep the lawn mower.

It's not Big Brother, just GIS - Geographic Information System.

The system eats huge amounts of data - everything from crime rates and fire extinguisher locations, to areas prone to flooding and the location of sewer lines - to produce giant, detailed multi-layered maps that can be used to study a community's evolution. And it can do so citywide or down to a single building.

The lay of the land in South Hampton Roads is photographed from an airplane and converted to digital images used by city officials to track and map trends, ranging from drug activity in a neighborhood to the ages of water and sewer pipes.

This week, firefighters from all over the country have gathered at Norfolk's Waterside Marriott for a conference where this technology is one of the topics.

Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake and Portsmouth all have GIS in limited capacities; Norfolk is developing a system officials hope will someday be so detailed that fire engines can be guided by computer to a fire. It also would provide firefighters with a structure's floor plan and the locations of nearby hydrants.

``That's certainly a few years out,'' said Charles Ragland, Norfolk's GIS administrator. But it is in the realm of possibility, he said.

``It really makes sense,'' said David Sullivan, Virginia Beach's director of information technology. ``You want to build a system whereby public utilities knows what public works is doing and vice versa.''

With GIS, city planners can plug all the information into one system and let it do all mapping and tracking.

GIS works using base digital maps generated from aerial photos and existing maps. Information from databases is plotted in layers on the maps, allowing city workers to see patterns and trends along streets, neighborhoods or entire sections of a city.

``It used to be somebody would have to go and search through file cabinets and documents and even look at maps and and put all this together'' by hand to do a report, said David Little, GIS mapping coordinator for Virginia Beach. ``GIS is about the only way you can assemble a large amount of information and get answers in a timely manner for making decisions.''

Little worked for Virginia Beach when the city began dabbling in GIS back in 1974.

Already, GIS programs have been used to map high-crime areas in Norfolk, track the ages of water and sewer pipes in Portsmouth, and make digital maps of every neighborhood in Virginia Beach.

Chesapeake officials say their version of GIS is in development. Suffolk has begun planning a system.

``I think it's probably as exciting right now as it was in the beginning,'' Little said. ``Each day, things that we used to . . . just dream about are realities. The hardware and software has evolved to a state where it can handle large amounts of data.''

Spurring the evolution is the decreasing cost of the hardware, said Adam Frisch, who oversees a fully integrated GIS in York County. ``Now, computers run 100 times faster and are cheaper.''

But that doesn't mean that the technology comes cheap. City officials estimate they are spending anywhere from $150,000 to $1 million a year to develop geographic mapping systems.

Norfolk, where data development for GIS is only about 20 percent complete, has invested about $850,000 in the technology so far, Ragland said.

Right now, Norfolk's system can take information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and map the lowest-lying areas in the city. That kind of mapping used to take hundreds of hours and had to be done by hand, Ragland said.

Now all it takes is some computer commands and a few clicks of a mouse.

Ragland said that the technology has brought a few surprises as well.

``We looked at commercial robberies,'' Ragland said. ``We found pretty quickly that it wasn't the banks and the 7-Elevens that were being hit, it was the small restaurants.''

Although similar applications can be run in other cities, Norfolk's approach to developing the technology is unusual, Ragland said.

The city established a GIS bureau with a staff of five that assists city departments with the development of databases for future use with GIS. The other cities, so far, have concentrated on developing their databases for GIS a few departments at a time.

Whatever the route, the destination is the same, Ragland said. And in the future, he said, cities may be sharing information with each other.

``The goal is for everyone to be exchanging data,'' Ragland said.

``We are going to publish all the information that's going to be on the GIS system on a CD-ROM,'' said Robert Morrisette, an assistant city engineer in Chesapeake. He said that the cost of the CD will probably limit buyers to developers and consultants.

Eventually, city officials say, other technologies like the Global Positioning Satellites will be used in conjunction with GIS, and some of the information will be made available to taxpayers via the Internet. MEMO: Norfolk has a GIS Bureau Home Page with information and an

interactive quiz. The address is www.Norfolk.va.us/infosys/gis. ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MOTOYA NAKAMURA photos/The Virginian-Pilot

Charles Ragland, left, administrator of Norfolk's Geographic

Information System, works on a map with technician Richard Olivieri.

Stormwater drainage data is added to Norfolk's system.

A handheld tool is used to put information from a map into the

system.

Side Bar

The program:

The Geographic Information System integrates aerial photos, maps and

database statistics to create a detailed map of a city.

The impact: