Spatially Accurate Data Increases Integrity of Ouachita Parish, LA GIS
Arvada, Colorado, October 9, 2009 – Pixxures, Inc., a Division of XeDAR Corporation, a leading provider of critical infrastructure geospatial services including data acquisition, processing, image analysis, data storage and Web services, has completed a parcel rectification project for Ouachita Parish, LA.
Ouachita Parish is approximately 611 sq miles, and is located at the hub of northeast Louisiana. The Ouachita Parish Assessor’s Office maintains their data in a Geodatabase comprising multiple related annotation layers, polyline layers, and polygon layers. Due to budget constraints, the Parish’s original data layers were built on digitized U.S. Geological Survey Quadrangle Sheets. Since the digitized quadrangle sheets were not very accurate, the resulting data sets were not accurate as well. "Once we placed our data layers on accurate imagery, we could see the magnitude of the problem we were facing," said Morgan Herring, IT Director for the Ouachita Parish Assessor’s Office. "In certain areas, we were unable to locate properties and measure improvements because of the discrepancies between the data layers and the imagery," added Herring.
In total, the Parish parcel layer group comprises 60,949 parcels. Pixxures used its proprietary vector alignment software, LineWorksr, to spatially adjust the parcel vectors to 1-foot pixel resolution, color aerial imagery. Pixxures aligned the parcel data to the imagery on a block basis, using the road Rights-of-Way (ROW) to move entire blocks of parcels to best fit the imagery at the ROW edges. Pixxures used features visible in the imagery to identify where the parcel vector data should reside and from this, created a vector realignment solution that was then applied to 17 annotation layers, 9 polyline layers, 1 point layer and 2 polygon layers. The project was successfully completed in 60 days.
Data integrity is a major issue for many of our customers," said Wendy Luck, Senior Program Manager at Pixxures, Inc. "GIS data is often shared by many different departments within a municipality. Questions regarding the integrity of your data can adversely affect the use of your GIS and the validity of its information."
"Now that our parcel data layers are accurately aligned to the imagery provided to us, we no longer have issues with sharing our parcel layers with other entities," said Herring. In the past, we would be asked why the data was not aligned. Now we do not have to field those types of questions, our data is spatially accurate. We have been able to provide an in-house website to our employees that can be used to view and search for properties in our parish. They can verify that they are looking at the correct property and in some cases even measure the size of the improvements. We use it as a tool to get our jobs done more efficiently."
About Pixxures
Pixxures, Inc., a division of XeDAR Corporation, is a leading provider of critical infrastructure geospatial services company located in the Denver area. Pixxures is focused on developing new and advanced technologies that result in high-quality cost-effective mapping and photogrammetry solutions for its customers. The company serves a broad base of clients including oil and gas, utilities, civil and environmental engineering, telecommunications, real estate, forestry, and federal, state and local governments. For more information, please go online to www.pixxures.com or call Normena Walton at 303-302-8591.