Lineworks® Case Study: Pixxures and The Town of Litchfield, CT
Overview:
The Town of Litchfield is approximately 57.3 square miles and is centrally located in the Northwest hills of Connecticut. Predominantly rural, the town is faced with development pressure due to the increasing growth of New York’s metropolitan area. Volunteers in the Assessors Office created the town’s first parcel map. It provides them with information about land use/activity and impact between the 4,200 parcels.
Challenge:
In 2004, aerial imagery was acquired through a collaborative effort between Connecticut Departments of Transportation, Environmental Protection and Public Safety and the Federal Highway Administration.
Once the parcel data layer was draped over the imagery, it quickly became apparent that the parcel layer had severe distortions and misalignment issues. In some cases, the misalignment and distortions were so bad that many of the buildings in the imagery resided in the wrong parcel.
Before contacting Pixxures, two other off-the-shelf software applications were utilized; however, they did not provide the Assessors Office with the results they were looking for. Some volunteers in the Assessors office heard about LineWorks®, Pixxures’ vector alignment solution and contacted Pixxures for an online demonstration.
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Unaligned Parcels |
Aligned Parcels |
Solution:
Pixxures provided the Assessors office with a 30-day evaluation copy of LineWorks and a training manual with step-by-step instructions on how to use the software. After working with the evaluation copy, the GIS volunteers were convinced that LineWorks might be their solution for addressing the inconsistencies with Litchfield’s parcel map. Pixxures estimates that a user should be able to complete an alignment of 5,551 parcels (approximately 512 links) in approximately 6 hours, once he/she has completed the LineWorks training.
Due to the number of inconsistencies in the parcel map and the limited amount of time the volunteers had to utilize LineWorks, they decided that their primary objective would be to ensure that all the buildings in the aerial maps, resided in the correct parcels.
The Assessors' office was able to utilize LineWorks to conflate the parcel map and bring it into compliance with their aerial data. "It is apparent that the parcel map has been vastly improved so that now, for instance, our town hall is not in the parcel next door!" said Harold Ducey, the town’s Assessor. "The building positions are now correct, which was the objective. I have already used the conflated map to solve a problem I had, which was most gratifying."
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Lineworks® Case Study: Pixxures and United Power
Overview:
United Power, a fast-growing electric co-operative, serves over 60,000 customers along Colorado’s Front Range. The service territory extends from the mountains of Coal Creek Canyon and Golden Gate Canyon to the farmlands of Brighton, Hudson and Keenesburg, representing some of the most diverse terrain and ground cover found anywhere. United Power acquired newer and more accurate ortho-imagery to use with its current GIS data and discovered spatial inconsistencies between the imagery and the parcel and facilities data layers.
Problem:
United Power found that the inconsistencies between its GIS data and the imagery presented challenges to the operations’ personnel in locating and servicing the facilities, and therefore presented challenges in providing a higher level of service to its customers. Traditionally, the methods used to align data included manual intervention in the GIS and use of simple rubber sheeting algorithms. However, working with 150 data layers, they found that these methods were not only manually intensive and time consuming, but the results were often inconsistent and inaccurate. United Power estimated that it would have taken more than a year to achieve the accuracy needed using manual methods of correction and applying the solution to all 150 data layers. United Power knew there had to be a better, faster and less expensive solution to this problem.
Solution:
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After LineWorks: |
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Pixxures, Inc. offered that solution with its LineWorks® service. Pixxures’ found that by applying stand-alone software to adjust the cadastral layer visually to fit the recently acquired orthophotography, which was considered to be spatially accurate, the conflation would be completed in a much more time-efficient manner. Once this solution was created and applied to the cadastral layer, the identical solution could then be applied to the additional 149 layers without further manual intervention. The LineWorks mathematical models permit the operator to precisely control and define the adjustment to the imagery. Changing control points on one area of the dataset did not affect any other data nodes unless the operator chose to do so. Parcels were reshaped to fit the true shape on the ground. The technology also allows a general shift and rotation to be applied across the entire project thus maintaining the area of a parcel while improving spatial accuracy. And with an on-the-fly conflation tool, the operator was also able to determine the effectiveness of each node and adjustment, reducing time in quality-control efforts as they are simultaneous with the initial adjustment.
As a result of our efforts, the inconsistencies in our GIS layers were eliminated in four weeks, with greater accuracy and at far less cost than applying traditional adjustment methods.
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