April 18, 2012 -- Terrace is a city of 11,486 on bench lands overlooking the Skeena River in British Columbia, Canada. The community is the regional retail and service hub for the northwestern portion of British Columbia and the seat of the administrative offices of the Kitimat-Stikine Regional District.
The City of Terrace hosted a public web mapping application that was developed on Autodesk MapGuide 6.5 technology. This site was used extensively by realtors, developers, the general public and internal staff to access maps, databases and reports related to geographic features. In the earlier days of web GIS, the MapGuide 6.5 application was the best on the market for serving spatial data to the web due to its client side applet. However, over time, web technologies evolved and the client side architecture became a security risk and a development liability. In 2008 Autodesk decommissioned the MapGuide 6.5 application. As a result the City wanted to enhance its online GIS services and provide increased functionality to internal staff using the latest server side MapGuide Open Source technology.
The City purchased iVAULT MapGuide with the Administration module to replace the existing MapGuide 6.5 application. iVAULT is a web based application that allows organizations, to quickly and easily publish GIS content to the web. You do not need a background in programming to use iVAULT. It allows organizations to easily benefit from linking their existing data to a location and visually see the asset you are managing adding value to your business processes. The City benefitted from the service-oriented architecture of the iVAULT Administrator to provide a fast, scalable, and cross platform web GIS application to realtors, developers, the general public and internal staff. iVAULT makes use of open source components to support rich access to spatial data in both vector and raster formats and provides a full suite of tools for map interaction, reporting, analysis, editing and printing. Using MapGuide Studio, the City was able to produce visually stunning cartographic maps and serve those maps to a wide audience. Pacific Alliance Technologies current hosts the new TerraMap site http://terrace.pat.ca and have written very elaborate FME (Feature Manipulation Engine) scripts. This keeps the data in the development environment within the City of Terrace current, along with the live hosted environment within the PAT collocation.
The City now has a fully supported and integrated web based GIS system that facilitates quality decision making. With iVAULT, the City benefits from improved strategic and financial planning. It also provides reliable and meaningful access to the City’s spatial and attribute data. iVAULT’s “Self Service” approach to GIS, has introduced efficiencies in the City’s workflows and provides easy access and increased utilization of City’s existing the resources. iVAULT provides a solution that facilitates the provision and maintenance of timely, accurate and complete data and is scalable for future integration with additional data sources. The easy to use Administration module replaces custom development with point and click configurability- empowering Terrace staff to administer the site themselves.
