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.

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.

http://gis.co.carver.mn.us/TRIP/launch.htm

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.

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.

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

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.