Finding Engineering Drawings and Real Estate Documents from the PortGIS Web Maps

At the Port of San Diego we have a mixture of enterprise systems which help us manage our data. GIS is the enterprise system which empowers port employees to tackle problems from a geographic perspective. We intend to complement, rather than replace or redo, other enterprise systems at the Port. Our goal is to handle the geography based questions and work in conjunction with the other systems. The PortGIS program is the geography based front-end for our enterprise data.

According to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s Federal Enterprise Architecture framework, 74 percent of government data is location based. At the state and local level the number is even higher – 80 percent – according to several organizations and publications.

Our leases with our tenants live in our document management system, Hummingbird DM 5, in PDF format. They also have an important geographic component. The leases are tied to a piece of land. The concept is also true for our official engineering drawings, which give a comprehensive picture of infrastructure on the Port Tidelands. Below are two videos which show how we can access this enterprise data from the PortGIS web maps.

How to find official engineering drawings from the PortGIS web maps

How to find leases and other important documents from the PortGIS web maps

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Introducing the PortGIS Present Conditions Web Application

The new web application PortGIS Present Conditions takes the most valuable aspects of PortGIS Utilities and builds upon them. With this iteration, our view broadens beyond our utilities infrastructure to gain full comprehension of our surroundings as they currently exist. This new web application brings with it a few enhancements, the largest being the integration of new, more accurate reference points to our engineering drawings. RH, as an intern in the Engineering and Construction department, spent many painstaking hours opening scanned record drawings, identifying the location where the majority of work took place, and creating point(s) so we can quickly and easily access them via a map. The PortGIS Present Conditions web application also brings direct access to these drawings, via a clear and organized structure. If you know the IMP site and the record drawing number, you can get to these drawings directly without finding them in the map. Below is a video where I go through accessing these drawings.

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Accessing our Engineering Drawing PDFs from within the PortGIS Utilities Web Application

Our PortGIS Utilities Web Application is a useful tool to share our data created in AutoCAD throughout the Port. The data shown is held and managed as .dwg files, which are primarily accessible only by the Civil Designers in our Engineering Department. The output of much of their work are blueprints. It is a reasonable notion to assume that GIS based maps and blueprints can easily be integrated, after all they both show spatial relationships. In order to bring CAD data into GIS our CAD users must follow both CAD and GIS standards. Using CAD data within GIS  is one of the great obstacles we as GIS professionals work to overcome. We are tackling this obstacle 2 different ways 1) We have created a folder, dubbed “the vault” , where CAD data follows GIS standards and 2) We have created a GIS feature and a link to the digital blueprint. This video below shows how we have addressed both of these methods and goes into detail on how to track down blueprints, as PDFs, for projects within Port Tidelands.

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