The Louisville and Jefferson County Information Consortium (LOJIC) has been in existence for nearly 20 years. It was established as a community-wide, shared GIS partnership, in the mid-1980’s, with the Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD) as its lead organization. In addition to MSD, the LOJIC partnership included Louisville Government, Jefferson County Government, Louisville Water Company, and Property Valuation Administrator (PVA) real estate assessing office. Since then, the County has gone to a metro government, so Louisville and Jefferson County (of which the planning commission was a member) have now merged into Louisville Metro Government.
The leadership of these member organizations formed an executive committee to oversee and manage the consortium. Their respective domain experts were called upon to form a technical committee with MSD engineers taking the lead in technical content. Each office contributed two representatives to serve on the technical team. Because Manatron CAMA had been present and heavily involved with the PVA’s real estate operations since 1979, Wayne Moore of Manatron was appointed to serve as one of the PVA technical representatives for the team.
In 1986, the LOJIC technical committee hired a GIS industry consulting firm and went about the task of developing Request for Proposals for a comprehensive GIS system. After an extensive decision making process, a relatively small, but up-and-coming GIS software vendor from Redlands, California, with a long name that nobody could remember, was selected from a field of about eight vendors that included the biggest names in the GIS business at the time, including IBM and Intergraph. The selected vendor’s name was impossible to remember so everyone started referring to them by their initials - ESRI.
The original ESRI Arc/Info software was first installed on a Prime minicomputer and within two years moved to a Sun client-server network under the UNIX operating system. The parcel layer was created in 1989 using a contractor to convert over 200,000 parcels from thousands of PVA paper maps to digital form in Arc/Info Librarian structure. LOJIC programmers created the initial parcel maintenance tools in AML and trained the PVA map technicians to maintain the new parcel layer in Arc/Info.
When the PVA office began its migration from the legacy CAMA system to Manatron ProVal in 1997, the decision was made to interface the LOJIC parcel layer with the CAMA software so that all parcel creation would take place in GIS. In 1998, the LOJIC parcel editor was re-written in AML to provide parcel re-description transactions to the CAMA system along with all data required to automatically create the parcels without the need for duplicate entry. The new GIS to CAMA integrated process went live in January 1999 and GIS has been the only source of new parcel information since.
“The Jefferson County PVA has always prided itself in being on the cutting edge of technology,” said Jefferson County PVA Chief Deputy, Donna Hunt. “We are very proud that we were one of the initial LOJIC consortium members, and our decision in 1997 to interface the LOJIC parcel layer with our Manatron CAMA software so that all parcel creation would take place in GIS has won us acclaims not only in the United States but around the world.”
In 2003 LOJIC began planning for migration of the parcel layer to the geodatabase in Oracle and again needed technical assistance as part of the PVA’s consulting and support arrangement with Manatron. In preparation for the migration, continuation of GIS based parcel management was needed in the new environment. Manatron facilitated a proof-of-concept investigation and developed a Statement of Work (SOW) for database migration and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) parcel editing software, recognizing that the days of developing these applications in-house had passed. The SOW was used as the basis for a Request for Bid (RFB) and the project was awarded to Smart Data Strategies, Inc. (SDS) in early November, 2004, with a planned conversion date in the Spring of 2005. The SDS Mapper parcel layer geometry editing software will perform all parcel re-description and call a standard Manatron Application Program Interface (API) to automatically pass all information to CAMA. In the Fall of 2005 the PVA office will migrate to Manatron GRM Records.
“In 2003 we made the decision that it was in the best interest of our office to move on to the next generation of integration and to again help set a standard in moving our parcel layer to a geodatabase,” added Hunt. “We feel that with the help of Manatron, and Smart Data Strategies, Inc. we will again be on the cutting edge of technology in land records geodatabase design. We are also excited about our plan for migrating to Manatron GRM Records which will give us the capabilities of providing current, real time data to all LOJIC consortium members through Web services.”
According to Curt Bynum, LOJIC GIS Coordinator, “Accurate and aggressively maintained property data is absolutely fundamental for any comprehensive municipal GIS operation. This important project will allow us to better leverage recent advancements in GIS technology and we will finally be able to integrate two key land records operations – CAMA and parcel map maintenance. This will not only streamline PVA business processes, but will result in a more robust land records database for our other partners and users.”
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