Environment Canterbury is looking at redeveloping our Internet GIS Tool and are seeking feedback from GIS Mapping users about the following:
- What you use the GIS site for?
- How you use it, what functionality do you use regularly?
- What functionality is not available that would be useful and why?
- What functionality would you consider a “nice to have” and a “must have”?
NOTE: For a great example of what’s possible have a look at the Auckland Regional Council Internet Mapping tool, to view click here : http://maps.auckland.govt.nz/AucklandRegionViewer/
For feedback click on the comments link above. (Leave a Comment)
ARC GIS Viewer
Use it all the time for engineering consultancy projects. Would be good to have a better beginning map that enabled you to find places better – the ARC one has a regional map with major roads etc, but the ECan one with Rivers (unnamed) isn’t particularly helpful
Hi. Use it almost daily for work in a planning consultancy for consents (district & regional) and policy work for district plans. I agree with Peter’s comment on the inital maps – having the main roads showing at any scale would be very usual.
It also would be good if you set the scale of the map being viewed on the screen, and also when printing.
In terms of other information, being able to separate out the types of resources consents e.g. wastewater discharge, stormwater discharge, air discharge, groundwater take, surfacewater take, gravel extraction, other landuses.
Could do with having the ability to turn on and off the legal descriptions for properties. We often need the property boundaries shown, but the legal descriptions end up creating a jumble of information on the screen.
Use GIS mapping regularly, at least a few times a week, as I work for a Māori environmental consultancy company and whenever we receive publicly notified Resource Consent applications from Council, I have to do a thorough property check. Always having issues with NZAA sites being greyed out – I have discovered that if you zoom out a little, this can help or if I take the legal descriptions off as well, that also helps, but sometimes you need to be zoomed in enough to locate the actual property that you are dealing with. I always use the following features:
Land Parcels and Ngāi Tahu Settlement Areas, as well as Springs, Silent Files and NZAA Sites. It would help if springs (shown as a small blue dot) and NZAA sites (small grey square, I think it is) are made a lot larger, as you basically need a magnifying glass to be able to locate these on the map.
It would be very useful to heve a direct link on the wells/bores to the well cart instead of looking them up in a different window. Sort of a hyperlink or similar.
Otherwise I agree with the other remarks, roads should be visible in the begin-screen. It’s very hard to figure out where you have to zoom in, especially when one is not that familiar with the region.
Looking forward to the new GIS Viewer!!
On the Land Parcel layer, the information on a parcel inclused the property Category and Landuse. Both of these contain coded values. I have searched without success for the description of these codes.
The Landuse and Category details associated with the landparcels layer in the online GIS are derived from the Valuation records for the land. The rules governing these codes are described in Rating Valuation Rules 2008 document found on Land Information New Zealand’s web site (http://www.linz.govt.nz/valuation/rules-and-regulations/DocumentSummary.aspx?document=226).
However, the values indicated in the layer should be considered indicative only, as their current-ness and implementation varies from Territorial Authority to Territorial Authority (which is where we source the data from).
As an aside we intend to include much more information about the layers within the online GIS ast part of any future redevelopment project. This will give much more meaning to the layers in the GIS, and definitely make the information available within it much more useful.
I use the site in relation to Environment assessment. The scale is difficult to use, as can only get a small window of what would like to view. Perhaps the maps could be broken up into catchments/geographical and then would be able to view a larger, in-depth portion. Do you run training sessions on using your mapping site?
What i would find very useful is the ability to display and select by SQL queries, i.e search for wells that are AE + greater than 25 m deep within a certain radius or area. Find this mapping serice pretty good though compared to others
I use the site all the time for professional and private purposes. I agree with comments about scale, it can be difficult to find the correct area. Also be useful to have query ability, and the graphics tools are limited, be useful to have better graphics ability.
It would be useful to have Surface Water Abstraction Points,flow measurement sites and bores which where ECan regularly measures water level, all with links to background data.