10:30am-11:00am
"Cobb County Tax Assessor’s Office: GIS Data Preparation for Conservation Use Assessment": James Fitzgerald
Property owners of agricultural land, timberland, and environmentally sensitive land, under official Code of Georgia (OCGA) Section 48-5-7.4, have the opportunity to qualify for conservation use assessment (CUVA). The Georgia Revenue Commissioner determines the values for ad valorem tax for CUVA properties and publishes the rules and regulations enabling the county tax assessors to evaluate qualifying properties. According to O.C.G.A, stated in chapter 5 section 7.4.1(B), a new provision prevents property owners from qualifying entire properties with a residence and now excludes the underlying property. The underlying property based on lot size and local zoning ordinances is prepared with geospatial technology. By using a combination of geospatial tools and python scripting in ArcGIS ModelBuilder 10.1, both enable an automated process used to create and designate the qualifying properties in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Future CUVA projects will be performed in a matter of minutes as opposed to hours by using python scripting and ArcGIS ModelBuilder 10.1.
Key Terms: ArcGIS 10.1, Python Scripting for Geometric Shapes, CUVA properties, O.C.G.A. Section 48-5-7.4, ArcGIS ModelBuilder 10.1,
11:00am-11:30am
"Developing a Community Engagement Component to Addressing Systems": Zachary Lancaster
Addresses matter to many people, and the address that a person has can be a the most important identifier in a persons life. An address can define where a person lives, where they work and many other activities that make up a modern life. The idea though of an address changes as you move throughout the world. Concepts like place names, street names and how an address is represented are often deeply cultural. Each part of the world's addressing patterns are unique. In many areas where functional addressing may have been absent, people will have created whole new ways of describing locations and how to navigate to them. It is for many of these reasons that it is critically important to engage with a community when considering either creating or updating an addressing system.
If we look at projects to create new addressing systems when none had previously existed, or where an older, dysfunctional system was in place, we can see both successes and failures. Places like Korea (replacing an older system completely) and Abu Dhabi (where a new addressing system is being implemented) are meeting with both technical and cultural challenges. These two cases, Korea and Abu Dhabi, are not unique. Many systems have encountered a lack of acceptance due to the authorities's reluctance to work with the community to understand existing way finding and cultural practices in the process of creating or altering an addressing system. This lack of engagement can create problems in many ares of the addressing system from practical navigation to the long term acceptance and use of the system. These issues arise in large part because the most frequent users of the system, local residents, become disenfranchised by the project. They often find the system confusing or difficult to use. In extreme cases, some people may resort to using older local systems of describing a location outside of the structure of the new official addressing system.
Public engagement in all aspects of developing an addressing system is critical. While the technical details of the system can be developed once a basic system design is agreed upon, it is important that members of the community are engaged in defining the rules of the Address Reference System (ARS). The role of the community cannot be understated. The people that live with the addresses are the ones who will interact with them on a day to day basis. This session will highlight the importance of engaging with the community, and discuss methods where local communities can be leveraged to create stronger and more usable addressing systems.
11:30am-12:00pm
"Cobb County Tax Assessor’s Office: PPDAC (Problem, Plan, Data, Analysis, and Conclusion) to Ensure Project Completion and Automation through ModelBuilder 10.1": James Fitzgerald
Every year Cobb County Tax Assessor’s evaluate and demonstrate property values either to be increasing or decreasing. Once the Residential department prepares the increased and decreased properties, the data is giving to the GIS department to display for the Cobb County Board of Tax Assessor’s monthly meeting. Processing large amounts of data and incorporating into a GIS can be an arduous task. Not an imposible task but none the less, a challenge, when data quality assurance and quality control (QAQC) and project completion in a timely manner are project priorities. Using a procedure called PPDAC (Problem, Plan, Data, Analysis, and Conclusion), GIS personel can problem solve, prepare a large quantity of data, and provide quality control and quality assurance (QAQC). Once PPDAC is established, ModelBuilder 10.1 can be used to automate the database preparation, data join, and export of shapefiles. Automation will ensure the project runs exactly as designed.
Key Words: Database Management and Analysis Tools, ArcGIS 10.1, Microsoft Access, PPDAC, Data Preparation, Data Join, and ModelBuilder 10.1
