The City of Baltimore’s CityView website (cityview.baltimorecity.gov) was recognized by the Public Technology Institute (PTI) in the category of GIS Significant Achievement at its Summit for CIOs last week in Boston.
“A wealth of useful geographic information about the City is available through CityView,” said Samatha Luckhardt, GIS Supervisor for the City of Baltimore. “We’re proud to have our vision and effort recognized by PTI. This result would not have been possible without the help of AppGeo.”
Launched in 2011, CityView was envisioned as “an interactive, online mapping tool designed to provide residents, visitors, researchers, and individuals doing business in the city easy access to a host of useful information about the City of Baltimore’s services and amenities” (City of Baltimore, Office of the Mayor).
CityView features an innovative Find capability that allows the user to formulate a question that the application can answer in the form of a map and descriptive information and links. CityView is designed to be the best place to get the answers to common questions, such as: What are the trash and recycling pickup days in a neighborhood? What is the zoning designation for a property? What are the census demographics within a neighborhood? How do I get to the museum or sports stadium? Where is the closest grocery store?
From a developer’s point of view, AppGeo built the front-end user interface to be friendly and intuitive using HTML5 and JavaScript. AppGeo developed CityView mapping services on the Esri ArcGIS Server platform to present a wide variety of mapped data (for example, points of interest, city, cultural, recreational and educational facilities, driving directions, zoning, and census demographics). And AppGeo incorporated a wide range of base maps (Esri Community Base Map, Bing Streets, Esri Streets, aerial photos, MapQuest, OpenStreetMaps, Google Street View and Bing Birds Eye) for the user to choose among. Also, and by design, AppGeo developed CityView so that City staff could control and maintain the site through a configurable database.
