geospatiaL innovation
Milwaukee MicroStation GIS Customization Project city of milwaukee/itmd-gis
With a population of 550,000 and an area consisting of 96
square miles, the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, needed to
efficiently generate, maintain, and distribute standardized
geospatial landbase and infrastructure data. The challenge
was to construct tools generic and robust enough to accommodate changes to datasets over time as more data and
requirements are brought on line.
The Berthing of the USS Ronald Reagan port of Brisbane corporation
Using MicroStation and Digital InterPlot, the task of producing,
distributing, and viewing Milwaukee’s geospatial data has
become highly streamlined. The city has multiple centers of
map and data production whose output is stored on multiple
servers and database schemas. But through the use of a
standard site configuration file, environment variables, and
city pull-down menus appended to the standard menu bar
(via the cityMenu mdl application), it can hide the complexity.
The berthing of the USS Ronald Reagan was a first for the
Port of Brisbane Corporation. The shipping channels and
the berthing configuration had to be presented to the United
States Navy as well as to the ship’s captain and crew. The
Port of Brisbane’s task was to create a visualization of the
swinging and berthing of the ship. In addition to accomplishing
this, it added to its visualization the clearance distances to
the edge of the swing basin and wharf structures to allow
the pilot and crew to have confidence in the procedure.
The rendering process, which was accomplished using
MicroStation, produced a set of 2,500 to 3,000 TIFF files
that were then stitched together to produce the AVI. The
Brisbane Marine Pilots have since presented the animation
at numerous conferences as the direction of pilot presentation
into the future.
