Local Government GIS Collaboration & TITAN

I had the pleasure of presenting the ERDAS TITAN solution at the Georgia URISA Conference a couple of weeks ago. This biennial statewide GIS conference is hosted by an organization dear to my heart (I served on the Georgia URISA board for five years with one term as President).

I also had the pleasure of having Joe Woycke, Cherokee County Director of GIS and Derrick Smith, GIS Manager of the City of Woodstock present after me in the same session. Joe and Derrick are working very hard to develop collaborative GIS between city and county, and in their presentation they described how TITAN proves to be 'one of the most effective means of quickly sharing and visualizing data without surrendering ownership of the data.'

Joe Woycke describing the utility of ERDAS TITAN in collaborative GIS:

County and municipal governments in Cherokee County have begun collaborating in the development of a collaborative GIS. Key to these relationships is the ability to quickly share current up to date data while retaining ownership. Many different software packages have been used to transmit and share data. ERDAS TITAN has proven to be one of the most effective means of quickly sharing and visualizing data without surrendering ownership of the data. The use of mash ups utilizing data from several different sources presented to the consumer in single client map provides great value to consumers (the taxpayers), who are not concerned about jurisdictional issues and petty parochialism. Current efforts are focused on efficiently serving and updating data with minimal overhead in terms of labor and bureauocracy, a task which TITAN is uniquely well suited for. The result is a more comprehensive GIS providing a cost savings and enhanced convenience to the citizens. Future development will be focused on providing a unified GIS to support emergency management operations, adding another aspect to the value added nature of this GIS collaboration.