County GIS Mapping Websites
August 15, 2008 61 Comments
Adena blogged about a county mapping site from Morris County, New Jersey (OK, I’ll admit right now I was born in Morristown, NJ; the county seat of Morris County). I had not seen the website before, but this comment from Adena got me curious:
It’s a quite complex app, the kind I’ve not seen implemented in Flash. It must be pretty slick; it was named site of the day by Adobe earlier this year. Do be warned: you may need to read the help to use the site!
Go to the website yourself and take a look. I don’t want to take away anything from the people who implemented it because it is very impressive, but is this the kind of GIS web map site that should be the public face of a county? My current county has a horrible MapGuide mapping site (you know the classic ActiveX plugin MapGuide thing?) that is difficult for even me to use. Most county websites (no matter if they use ESRI, Autodesk, open source, other*) are very difficult to use, take forever to load, run very slow, require plugins, require reading a manual and frustrate the heck out of me.
Shouldn’t a country web mapping site be simple and easy to use? I would assume the average user of a county website doesn’t have an engineering degree so why not aim these sites at the user level? And we need to be held acountable for accepting them (I’ve been using the Maricopa mapping site for as long as I can remember and I’m pretty sure I’ve never complained to the county, just on this blog). So right now I’m going to contact my county and let them know their website isn’t useful and you should do the same.
Won't someone please think of the GeoMonkey?
About James Fee
This is why Google will eat GIS “professionals”‘ lunch.
It’s the usability, stupid!
Uh oh – that’s fightin’ talk. I’ll hold your coat…
I’ll comment while I wait for that site to load…
You’re writing here about something that I simultaneously understand and don’t. I think I know how it happens most of the time — agency gets money to put something up 7-8 years ago, novelty alone pleases them, then money goes away and they’re stuck with 1998 technology. And note I say ‘agency’ because there are countless bad sites in academia as well, most of which are the products of a similar grant->no grant scenario.
But if 2.0 and Google’s map efforts have taught us nothing (and there are plenty of people who have indeed learned nothing), it’s that atanas entchev there is right, that the cognitive glide resulting from attention to usability and intuitive UIs counts for a lot. Hardcore GIScientists can dismiss Google Maps or OpenLayers or kaMap, etc. as toys if they like, but there’s surely a time and place for really good toys. And if your time=looking up parcel data and your place=Morris County, NJ, you might be a little more inclined to play with toys.
Anyway, that site is up and it looks like I have some reading to do before I can zoom in on something.
So that is why you are so snarky, you got Jersey blood in you.
Seriously though, how long does it take to load that website? My county has a horrible ArcIMS site that hasn’t been updated in years.
The whole British Columbia putting data into Google Earth and Maps is a great idea (heck give it to Virtual Earth as well) and makes it accessible to everyone.
When I see websites such as this one, I can only think that it was designed by GIS people for GIS people. Harkens back to this discussion I think, eh?
http://blog.fortiusone.com/2008/08/05/the-professional-vs-the-amateur-thoughts-on-the-esri-uc/
I like the one the town of Bloomsburg, PA uses.. all you need is Acrobat.. http://www.bloomsburgpa.org/ZoningMap02.08.pdf
and here:
http://www.bloomsburgpa.org/compplan.htm
The two things about our current internal ArcIMS (blech!) website that I often hear from users is that they want a site that acts more like Google Maps (i.e. slippy AJAX goodness), and that ease of use is extremely important.
The approach we’re taking is to develop our main public-facing county site with MapGuide OS, most likely using Fusion. There should be enough goodies on the site for the geospatially inclined, while still maintaining a relatively easy to use and nice-looking site.
We’re also looking at developing some sites dedicated to a single task using OpenLayers, or possibly the AGS JavaScript API. Putting out KML/KMZ is also an option we’re also seriously considering since many people I talk to tell me how much they use Google Earth.
There was a time I would’ve aimed for a site that tried to give the user everything under the sun and the kitchen sink like Morris County’s. I’ve since realized that that isn’t what will best serve our user base at all.
Over-engineered and un-usable.
And given the mad ActionScript skillz on display, you’d think they would throw in a nice Flash pre-loader to distract me from the rather slow progress of the default Flex “Loading” widget.
Painful–because obviously a ton of work went into this.
BT
Simplicity:
http://www.portlandmaps.com
About 7 years old now, definitely needs a once over with some tiling tech (still working on that), but for absolute functionality I think this format works best.
Lots wants to make ArcGIS on the web, instead of making an informational web site using GIS.
Doesn’t have that ooh-ahh factor (unless you count our Google Earth page, maybe our advanced view), but I bet our usage stats blow away pretty much any other municipal mapping site out there. Average 7,000 visits per day on weekdays, 178k total in July.
We are getting ready to roll out our ArcIMS replacement site this month. We decided to go with the ArcGIS Server Javascript extender for Google Maps. Our users get mapping they are used to and we can easily integrate into our existing ArcGIS stack. We’ve really started digging the REST API and I’m sure we’ll start really having some powerful simple applications out.
Our old site is about as horrible as an ArcIMS site could be. The new one running ArcGIS 9.3/SQL Server 2008/ArcGIS Image Server will blow it away. We’ve learned that we need average county users to test it to make sure it makes sense. Thinks like an ID button make sense to us, but to the guy on the street, they have no clue. I couldn’t even explain the logic behind the zoom out box to the group.
It is liberating to have lightweight web apps that people want to use, rather than what we had before. Plus we don’t have to break our ArcGIS stack to leverage it.
John:
Which county are you with?
LOL, no. But I did drink from the Kool Aid fountain of the UC a couple weeks ago.
(I see your changed your comment so this might not make sense to people)
I am a realist, what can I say. Our ESRI stack is not going anywhere so I might as well embrace it and extend it to where our users are. I will not be defeatist because I am using Windows/SQL Server/ArcGIS Server.
Our county does not like employees to blog or represent the county on blogs so I am keeping my mouth shut on where it is. I will say we are in Michigan and James is free to check my IP to see where I am.
I literally wanted to barf when the little loading animation came up…
Did Homer Simpson have a hand in that site’s creation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Brother,_Where_Art_Thou%3F
Interesting site design, although somewhat seizure inducing at times!
BTW, since I’m in Michigan, I’m very interested in seeing John’s REST-based site in action. Toyed around with it a bit here to push out a zoning layer to Google, but that’s the extent of my programming knowledge (actually, lack of time since I’m the only GIS guy in a city of over 80K people….ugh).
Hey, it gives a little thank you message when you leave the site. What’s not to like about that?
Good discussion. Let me go back a step: Are GIS programmers/users ever taught anything about UI design/usability? (I never studied GIS nor programming, so I certainly never studied it in school.)
As I noted in my ESRI UC coverage, I attended a session on this at the ESRI UC and was, like many others, disappointed.
I added a lesson to my course with some basics and have the students explore and critique both a desktop and Web app. I stole that idea from my undergrad days: we had to critique and redraw a professional’s map. (But we could not use one created by anyone on the faculty…)
Why is UI design not a focus in GIS? Does ESRI offer a discussion on it at the Developer Conference? Do other companies offer education on this topic?
Phillip:
My total hits yesterday was 364,598. Our monthly page views are in the millions. Again however ours is not in the ohhh-ahh category but for the data that we serve out we are doing pretty good. We are currently looking at our options for the rewrite.
http://gisgate.co.clark.nv.us/openweb/asp/openweb.asp
Clark County, Nv
I liked the philosophy Adrien Holovaty espoused in the Where 2.0 keynote – local governments should not be in the business of building web applications. They should be in the business of exposing the data easily to the public and let other people build applications around them. If you make the raw data available in open standard formats the community will build great applications for the data. You could probably flow the same concept up through state and federal government as well.
I’m sure this would cause major upheaval in the plethora of consulting firms and integrators that build various one offs like the Morris County site, but I think the tax payers would be getting a lot better bang for their buck.
Why stop at IT services ? Local governments
could be comprised of a dozen or so “contract
manager” Directors and we could contract out
all city services to private firms.
@Adena: It is hit and miss. Some of the best programmers/developers I know have degrees in Geography .
A lot of what I see is entrenchment of way we are used to doing things. The ways we propose users zoom, query (SQL statements in country GIS sites is scary to my Mom) and present information are just not optimal to those who want quick answers. We are so used to solve complex problems that we assume everything needs to be complex.
That is the magic that Google figured out with their Maps. Take everything away and then build from there. The ability to have geoprocessing is irrelevant if the user can’t figure out how to zoom in.
It’s tough to design a good web site with only one hand (because the other is leanin’ up against that shovel, you know).
Plus County workers have so little to do, aside from sleeping under the desk. When is there time to desgin a good web site? Between naps? that’s like only an hour / day!!
Oh, and then there’s the Union. County worker union contracts prevent ANYTHING from being done SIMPLE.
The site could have been better and loaded much faster with breaking it up in to different modules so the user wouldn’t ever see the loading past 3-4 secs.
I like using Flash/Flex for interfaces as I can do some interesting things with the layers. When we get our guest version completed I’ll invite every one to criticize it.
holy shit! maps for nerds! this is far away from easy-to-use. too much text, too much tiny little boxes with too much information. nerdy stuff.
ever asked yourself if Boo Wilbury knows the difference between “identify” and “selection”?
never mind.
Eeuugh… reminds me of the horrible widget-ridden Dilbert re-write a couple of months back (http://www.dilbert.com is the nasty one, http://www.dilbert.com/fast is the easy one).
Nice brown 70s retro look, too. And it’s s-l-o-w, both loading and re-drawing. Not sure I agree with Rob either, I think 4 seconds is too long for a simple public web interface, and gee-whizz Flash interfaces are usually just a PITA. It may be fun to build this stuff, but it’s not always so much fun to use it.
As for GIS/programmers learning about GUIs, most computing degrees teach GUI design, and most programmers seem to forget it as soon as they graduate. Meanwhile, my current GIS MSc course has no real GUI design content, as the main usability focus is on map outputs, and most of the students have no real background in IT anyway.
But the map in this site is a minor feature compared to all the other crap on the screen, so it’s not a purely GIS issue, it’s a basic GUI design issue.
As for needless complexity and public sector IT, you get a multiplying effect when you combine IT pe0ple who love to play with complex toys, with government workers who are convinced their businesses are so complex that they can only be presented in a fiendishly complex manner. Bureaucrats tend to like bureaucratic systems – on paper or on the computer screen.
The challenge is for developers to show them an alternative. But if you’re used to using ArcGIS all day, it may take you a while to wind back down to ordinary “user” level. So you need to get – and pay attention to – lots of input from real users for this kind of stuff.
But you all know that already – it’s not rocket science: just Keep It Simple, Stupid!
The javascript alert at the end thanking me for using the site made me increadibly hostile.
Is this thing 508 compliant? I can’t imagine our county approving something like this.
Or is Flash/Flex 508 compliant?
We are in the middle of fixing some issues in 2.0. Email me if you got any questions or suggestions. We have some exciting GIS web apps in the pipeline at Solano County.
http://gis.solanocounty.com/solanomaps/
3 minutes to load.
14 seconds to refresh
I used to live in Parsippany. It took almost 20 minutes to find my old house!
wow….that site is HORRIBLE! I bet if that were all .NET ADF and not flash you’d see much better performance.
I work for a city government. I’m a Web App developer and have nil experience with GIS. I am very excited about ESRI ArcGIS 9.3 because it will allow me as a web developer to access our GIS data. We don’t have an official online GIS presence yet and I’m glad because I think the built-in tools from ESRI are crap. I’m excited about using the tools I know, Google Maps, Flex, and Javascript, to finally access the once closed world of GIS. Mapping is the future and its good to see ESRI opening up.
@Sean Gorman,
I think you’re going down the right path talking about government exposing data and generally letting others do the legwork with developing applications. As I mentioned in my earlier comment, I talk to lots of real estate pros and other potential users of our data among the general public in my county who use Google Earth almost daily. I’ve been thinking that because of that we really ought to be leveraging KML/KMZ as a simple way to put out our data in a usable format. The great thing about that is that the effort would be minimal on our part. Public W*S services are also something I’m really hoping to get into in the near future.
As much as the aspiring developer in me would like to build slick apps with tons of wow factor, it all boils down to the fact that we just don’t have the time, staff, and often money, to develop apps the way I’d really like it to . Our plate is full just maintaining our county data and supporting our internal GIS users.
As so often happens in government, the challenge in getting these sorts of things done lies in the political/policy arena, not the technical arena. I’m working hard to show my policymakers that things have changed drastically and that it’s in our best interest to get our data out from behind the walls that have been erected. I’m sure others are doing the same thing, and I hope that they’re having some success as I am.
Firstly, want to say I enjoy your blog. Very informative.
Regarding the Morris County site: I did find that site difficult to use and thats coming from a GIS Professional – I can’t imagine the general public comments. With age-old concepts of “keep-it-simple-stupid” and today’s montage “I-need-it_yesterday” I found the site went the exact opposite?
I have been experimenting with Google’s api which I’ve found the responses I’ve gotten so far from testers has been very positive: easy to use, familiar, and displays the information they are looking for. Albeit, it is in beta format at this time.
And when you consider the economy as it is in its current state (and city and state governments cutting and/or preventing costs across the board) I’d have to say Google’s free API has been a definite step in the right direction for us.
James:
I know you’ve commented before on the Greenwood County, SC guys. We’ve recently implemented their site, I think it’s fantastic and extremely user friendly. It’s base is (wait for it) ArcIMS and VB.
http://gis.peoriacounty.org
I hope it doesn’t break, this is pretty much my first announcement.
To me, any site created with the ArcIMS tools looks outdated. This is why its so cool that ArcGIS 9.3 is letting outsiders in. Check out these mashups:
http://www.spatialkey.com/spatialkey/www/gallery/gallery_home.cfm
Universal Mind does do some really nice flash work and definitely has a more modern feel to it. Although mixing a kernel density analysis with proportional symbols is a bit dangerous. When we first did web based heat maps (GeoIQ) we had problems with users not understanding that the hot spot was not necessarily the highest value on the map. It is the highest aggregation of points that are proximate to each other that have a combined high value. Which is valuable, but when you combine it with proportional or graduated symbols and only make those symbols available after you have zoomed in to a micro level the user to could end up with the wrong impression that the larges value in that zoom is the largest value on the map. This is often not the case.
This was one of the reasons we deprecated the heat mapping – people were using it and interpreting it incorrectly. It needed a better workflow built around it to ensure proper utility. In my mind this is one of the biggest challenges of bringing more sophisticated GIS functionality o the GeoWeb.
That small nit aside the site proves two point brilliantly. One that the language or programming framework you use has next to nothing to do with the app ebing good or bad. The Universal Mind apps are Flash as was the Morris County app. Whether the app was Flash, .NET, ADF, javascript, rails, geodjango etc. matters very little in my mind.
Second the applications show the cool things you can do with state and local data when it is made accessible to outside third parties. It is a classic innovation economy phenomenon. A market is much better at innovating than a bureaucracy. Anytime you enable a network effect and allow more opportunities for innovation you are going to win.
Great article. I could not agree more. I wrote a blog back in February very similiar to the points you are making here.
http://www.geo-jobe.com/blog/2008/02/12/not-everyone-knows-gis-why-do-we-continue-to-build-web-maps-like-they-do/
~Neill
DW – I was quoting unique visits. Page views / hits doesn’t tell as good a story I think because a single user or a search engine spider can rack up lots of “hits.”
But for the record our page view count (pages only, no images) in July was 4,734,793.
As an afterthought on rereading these posts here, those specifically referring to Google, I was wondering if anyone had any insight (James?) regarding a Geocoder via Php/Mysql. I’m trying, in vain I might add, to create a geocoder pushing out data from our server and plotting to our map (http://maps.peachtree-city.org/). If anyone does, and I don’t want to bogg down Jame’s Blog please email me @ twhitley@peachtree-city.org
James, hope you don’t me asking this on your blog but I’m at my wits end here.
Best Regards,
Tony
@TFaustino: My only experience with a “free” geocoder is Yahoo!s which I think works very well. You might want to check out Peter Batty’s post on the Google Geocoders and some of the comments on that post. Might be worth asking over there as well:
http://geothought.blogspot.com/2008/08/google-local-search-better-than-google.html
Micah,
best site I’ve seen yet!
James,
Thanks a lot; that did open the door for more research regarding local search implementation or Yahoo’s geocoding service – which seems to get a lot of praise.
Thanks again!
Best Regards,
Tony
Aside from the fact that it’s slooooowwwww, what irks me is that the mapping portion isn’t even front and center. It’s relegated to a position off to the side while an empty table sits in the prime position. Too much has been crammed onto the page instead of just picking the most important functions and offering everything else as an option.
well, in that regard I’d argue that the map doesn’t have to be front and center everything. I’d rather be using GIS and not even know it if that could be possible.
@TFaustino
Here is another Free Geocoding tool that we have used quite a bit.
http://www.geo-jobe.com/blog/2008/07/17/free-geocoding-service/
@Neill: Thank you very much – I will definately give that a couple of runs!
Best regards,
Tony
What it comes down to is most users want data, not just maps. Maps only tell you one aspect of the information. To use a database analogy, for parcel information, they are a single attribute in a schema with many columns.
GIS Departments end up becoming the defacto place to publish land information. We’re all GIS folks so our tendency is to make it all about the map, but land information is not only about maps. So making everything map centric is extremely limiting.
We realized in 2001 that most people find locations by using an address or intersection, which is why PortlandMaps uses it as its primary search screen. There are mapping based searches if you want them, and more advanced search tools, but we keep those a couple layers back so as not to confuse novice users and clutter the interface for people who don’t need them (probably 95% of the users.)
The really neat thing about abandoning the concept of a map centric interface, is it opens you up to so many more possibilities of display information, creating dynamic reports, and integration into other apps. Its also WAY easier to code, I’ve built those map centric interfaces and it’s a huge pain.
If you’re really interested in knowing more about our design principals I wrote a paper on it for the ESRI UC a few years ago, I think the county linked in this blog post could stand to read it (we once made the same mistakes they did):
http://gis.esri.com/library/userconf/proc05/papers/pap1297.pdf
Ugh… full screen Flash apps started appearing 2 years ago – haven’t they been a rollicking success…
Bring on the MS Virtual Earth – ESRI alliance I say!
Ok, I also agree the Morris site is slow and not an overall good site, its an overload of information, the common NJ person would have no clue where to start, and its SLOW SLOW SLOW, I think most people would not even bather. I can’t imagine loading that site with dial-up. ( Yes a lot of my user still have dial-up)
I am from Washington County, NY, we are using ArcServer. I really like it so far let me know what you think!
http://gis.co.washington.ny.us
Here is a screenshot of the new tile cache I’m working on for the Solano County Maps application. Btw we launched a new county website on Sunday.
http://gis.solanocounty.com/preview/benicia.jpg
Gilbert,
The Solano site is really great! What technologies are you using?
@David
The web components were custom developed using C# and javascript/ajax. For the tile cache (1st version), a C# application was implemented, which generated a tile cache by hitting ArcIMS. That posed some performance and labeling issues.
For v2, I’m currently wrapping up a fully custom developed distributed tile cache generator, which will be installed on anywhere from 4-8+ PCs or servers. Each tile cache theme has about 550K 512×512 tiles.
The database backend is MySQL w/some custom GIS functionally added. I made this “weird” GIS DB choice in order to learn some computational geometry.
Way to busy. I didnt spend much time to play with it but a county mapping site shouldnt need to give the customer time to play with it to produce results. I like my counties better, however it does take time to load and its a bother.
@Heather
Are you running 9.2, or have you upgraded to 9.3? I’ve trying to do some very informal and unscientific benchmarking of AGS sites to see if there was any improvement in performance from 9.2 to 9.3.
@Roger
We are not going to upgrade to 9.3 for a while wer are currently running 9.2. We work with a consultant and they asked up not to upgrade to 9.3 unitl they were ready beucase a lot of the tool packages and our web map came from them and they are not ready to support 9.3
@Heather
Thanks. Your site seems to perform pretty well for an apparently non-cached 9.2 site. I’ve been very underwhelmed, as have many others, by the overall performance in 9.2. It’s supposed to be better in 9.3, but I’m taking a wait-and-see attitude.
@Roger
We had a lot of performance issue at first and we had our engineer do some work with our firewall on the server side, I don’t remember all the details now, but if you want I could find out. I remember feelling extremely overwhelmed and frustrated at the time, but now it runs much better.
I fully agree that most county websites are not what they should be. That said I get mostly positive comments on our site http://www.gis.catawba.nc.us/website/Parcel
While not exactly your normal county GIS site. I like this site from Carver County, MN ( I would hope so, I developed it) . It uses ArcGIS Server 9.3 and the javascript API to display the County’s parks and trails for the purpose of encouraging recreation and fitness in the County.
http://gis.co.carver.mn.us/TRIP/launch.htm
In regards to the Morris site, I actually find it very innovative since it allows for serious data mining and not just basic maps like many of the other sites out there. I also like how images and video have been incorporated into the site. Check out Butler it is pretty cool, I could see a pic of my appt. complex. It is almost like an encyclopedia of information made available once you take some time to figure out where to start. You do need to take the time to read the manual though to make use of all the features. I can see where reality and insurance companies will make good use of this site.
Greg K., sure the site is very deep.
My problems with the site have nothing to do with my ability to use it. I’m very familiar with the WebADF and how to use it. Here is why it fails.
1. It takes 5 minutes to load in the browser. Citizens of Morris County will just go elsewhere for their information.
2. It is overly complex. Sure one can read the manual, but to bring data to the people, you shouldn’t have to sit down and learn how to us it. County websites should be intuitive.
3. Not Section 508 compliant
4. Requires a plugin to run. I have no problem using Flash to enhance a website, but downloading a plugin shouldn’t be a requirement for citizens to view maps online.
5. Search is horrible. The only way to enable a search box is to do it the Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft way, simply. Requiring users to formulate a SQL query is a show stopper.
If the purpose of the Morris County website was to give realtors and insurance companies a tool, then the citizens of Morris County (heck I’m a native as I was born there) should be very disappointed.
While the service provider role definitely has strong potential for counties, it also is fraught with enormous hurdles.
Try telling your assessor that someone can now access all the parcel geometry and property information and replicate it into a local database.
Try explaining to your IT people that all of your imagery tiles can be directly accessed and downloaded into local caches in less than 10 clicks. (And then try to explain the same to your orthophotography vendor.)
And the biggest issue, once you make the service available, sunshine laws and other public access issues will kick in. As an example, we could track law enforcement vehicle locations, retain those locations, and convert them into an internal GeoRSS feed. Once we do though, such information becomes subject to public access for use in criminal cases. So, we do not retain the information.
Adding to this is the relationship with other local government entities. Our county has a relatively open policy on geospatial data ($50 buys you everything on DVD except the aerials). As a result, the cities will not share with us; adjacent counties will not share with us. Instead, these other entities complain that open data policies hurt their deparments. How can you charge $500 in cost recovery for a data request when the next county over charges only $50? If we start offering free geodata services, the backlash from other entities will almost certainly get worse and those complaints will go above the heads of the GIS and IT staff and directly to county executives and elected officials.