Migrating Client GIS Data to LGM Industry Standards
The standardization of a practice has always been a key component to the advancement of that practice. In GIS, ESRI has championed the standardization of data management. The leader in GIS industry solutions has officially adopted product line support for standardized data model templates. Such templates provide industry professionals a structured and well defined yet flexible schema for the storage, transmission and manipulation of data specific to their field. Weston & Sampson specializes in migrating a client’s existing GIS data to these industry standards especially the local government model (LGM). The LGM is a data model focused on the needs of a community or organization, its managers, planners, engineers, and citizens/members. Its structure neatly identifies whole sectors of an organization’s concerns from politics and census data to utilities, assessor’s information, fire services, law enforcement, emergency operations and more. By migrating data to the LGM, organizations enjoy access to a wide pool of resources for things such as; creating rich and interactive web mapping applications, community information sharing portals and the management of record documents. Since these are pre-built around the model’s standard structure, they are easily configured and readily deployed without specialized GIS or programing knowledge. Additionally, the LGM makes data sharing easier. As more communities and organizations adopt this format it becomes easier for collaborations between parties such as neighboring towns, a community and its consultants or vendors, or even across departments within a community such as between assessors and planning. Finally, the LGM is a fully supported structure which means that Weston & Sampson as an ESRI business partner has direct access to ESRI’s support team to aid in the configuration and management of the data model to assure its optimal performance for a given task.
Weston & Sampson has migrated entire private and public organizations to this format including the following:
- Arlington, MA (water, stormwater & wastewater)
- Bethel, CT (wastewater)
- Burlington, VT (water, stormwater, & wastewater)
- Burlington, MA (wastewater)
- Arlington, MA (water, stormwater & wastewater)
- Bethel, CT (wastewater)
- Burlington, VT (water, stormwater, & wastewater)
- Burlington, MA (wastewater)