Client Success Story

Managing CAMS including new Spatial Enhancements

Hayley Rokahr, Land and Catchment, Department of Sustainability and Environment, Victoria

Since early 2001, Catchment Management Authority (CMA), Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) and Department of Primary Industries (DPI) staff have been using the Catchment Activity Management System (CAMS) to assist with the management of on-ground and community capacity works projects in Victoria.CAMS, developed for DSE by Spatial Vision, enables Departmental and CMA staff to record a wide range of information on works including the activities involved, their funding details, the expected outputs and assessment of those outputs.Increasingly funding bodies are requiring detailed reporting of the outcomes delivered for the dollars invested to ensure that funds are delivering real environmental value.

CAMS serves the dual purpose of assisting Departmental and CMA's to manage the works projects in detail whilst also enabling statewide reporting of outcomes for strategic and investor purposes.CAMS is now used by hundreds of registered users and contains details of over 14,000 individual works projects involving over $100 million in government funding.

In addition to a comprehensive range of textual information about works projects, CAMS has always enabled the collection, management and display of spatial information, specifically the area (or site) impacted by the works projects or subject to assessment.In 2000, web-based GIS was in its infancy and CAMS implemented spatial information display query, capture and upload via a number of custom developed solutions, based on the ESRI product range, Oracle Spatial and a custom Java applet developed by Spatial Vision.

Over the last four years, web-based mapping and GIS has advanced substantially with a broad range of powerful vendor-based products including the ESRI server products ArcSDE and ArcIMS.During this time, DSE had implemented a corporate GIS infrastructure called Mapshare, based on the ESRI server software products.

In mid 2003, Land and Catchment decided to undertake a substantial upgrade of the mapping and GIS components of CAMS to take advantage of the Mapshare infrastructure and other increased GIS capabilities then available. Spatial Vision was contracted to implement the upgrade which included the following components:

A. The replacement of the custom-developed CAMS mapping component with a new one based on Mapshare (ArcIMS). This new mapping component was faster and more flexible than the existing one. Part of this upgrade also included moving the CAMS spatial layers from Oracle Spatial to ArcSDE.

B. The development of a number of map-based reports based on the new mapping functionality.

C. The original Java applet used to interactively capture spatial features via a web browser has been replaced with Spatial Vision’s Tractus product, which supports more powerful browser-based data capture and editing, and direct update to the CAMS ArcSDE layers.

D. The implementation of a greatly enhanced spatial data upload capability. This spatial upload component enables CAMS users to capture the site features remotely, possibly via GPS and upload the resulting data directly into CAMS, having it automatically checked, restructured and linked. The upload component supports multiple datums, projections and spatial data formats.

Figure 1: Map display and spatial data capture screens from the original CAMS application 

Figure 2: Example map and search screens from the enhanced CAMS  

Figure 3 : Example map reports  

Figure 4: Enhanced spatial editing via the Tractus applet  

Figure 5: Screens showing the spatial data upload process and resulting sites  

Figure 6: Extracted CAMS sites in ArcMap, coloured by output type

E. The implementation of a new spatial data extraction component, enables CAMS users to select and extract areas of the CAMS spatial layers in a range of formats, datums and projections. The data can be selected by a combination of geographic extents as well as by a range of business attributes such as the funding source. The extracted data is delivered with a broad range of CAMS textual attributes pre-joined to the spatial features to greatly enhance their usability.

The result of these mapping enhancements substantially increased the flexibility of mapping in CAMS. Users can now upload and extract spatial information in a variety of formats, datums and projections. The extracted data is pre-joined to a broad range of CAMS business information, enabling users to carry out specialized analysis, reporting and planning (of future) of their works projects.

Building on the common Mapshare infrastructure enables Land and Catchments to leverage a large number of available spatial layers to add context. This also enables them to add and modify these layers using in-house skills and there is no requirement for application code changes. The inclusion of additional map layers such as 1 in100 year flood data and conservation status of ecological vegetation classes enables CAMS users to better evaluate works projects in the context of their local environment. Most importantly, these mapping enhancements increase the level of integration between the CAMS textual and spatial information, ensuring that the effort involved in capturing and maintaining the information in CAMS can be fully leveraged.

CAMS has recently been demonstrated to Commonwealth and other State government groups and has generated considerable interest as a possible model and/or solution for their management of such information.

Copyright © Spatial Vision, Wednesday, 27-October-2004