The Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's Office, Florida, recently migrated its existing automated mapping system to a new parcel maintenance solution. Like many organizations involved in parcel maintenance activities, the Property Appraiser's Office wanted more from the new parcel mapping solution. It sought a solution that would enable it to take advantage of the latest object-oriented developments.

"We wanted to work with the latest technology, but it was also imperative that comparable processes for maintaining the parcel fabric and producing cartographic representations remained in place as we migrated to the new platform," says Roger Harris, assistant director of Technology Services for the Property Appraiser's Office.

Palm Beach, the largest county in the southeast United States, consists of 2,232 square miles. The first computer system was installed in the Property Appraiser's Office in 1968. At that time, there were 130,000 parcels that made up the ad valorem tax roll. Today, there are approximately 537,000 parcels on the tax roll valued at close to $80 billion.

The Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's Office is responsible for determining the value of all real estate and other property in the County for the purpose of taxation. It has a staff of 239 deputies and an annual budget of $16 million.

Before establishing its own model to support the County's specific property appraisal needs, the Property Appraiser's Office evaluated a wide variety of data models. Building on its existing object-oriented experience, the office was able to accomplish its goal of establishing a robust model that met its Business requirements.

"It was a challenge to meet our cartographic output requirements in the geodatabase," says John Enck, GIS manager for the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's Office.

"The synchronization of line features and polygon features posed a big challenge as we tried to symbolize different parts of a parcel. For instance, we needed to differentiate between lines such as lot, subdivision, and water that, in essence, were coincident lines forming a polygon."

The Property Appraiser's Office was impressed with the core technology of Esri's ArcGIS software. However, it needed a parcel maintenance application to sit on top of the ArcGIS engine. Working with GeoAnalytics Inc., an Esri Business Partner, a survey was conducted of all Esri Business Partners, and NovaLIS Technologies, an Esri Canada Business Partner, was selected because of the company's commitment to the geodatabase and ArcGIS environment.

NovaLIS' Parcel Editor 8.1 provided a simple way to manage the environment using the shared geometry editing capabilities in ArcGIS. In addition, the software enabled mappers to code symbology of individual lines during construction of the parcel database by using the polygon construction tools in ArcGIS.

"When we migrated from a different object-oriented GIS platform, we were extremely interested in taking advantage of the object-oriented capabilities provided by the geodatabase and ArcGIS 8.1," says Enck. "Combining NovaLIS' ArcGIS and parcel application experience with our own, we resolved many of the unknowns associated with polygon topology, the relationship with line work, and our cartographic requirements."

The Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's Office used the data modeling capabilities provided by the geodatabase to ensure that the integration of polygon, line, and cartographic rules was achieved as they migrated to the new platform. The Property Appraiser's Office defined a data model to support not only the general mapping geographies of section, township, range, subdivision, block, and lot but also the objects to support the specific needs of its office such as parcel, condo, taxing boundary, and address.

"Cadastral users like the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's Office are establishing robust applications and extended data models in the ArcGIS 8.1 environment," says Steve Trammell, Esri cadastral solutions manager. "By integrating Business Partner solutions with our technology, users have found a cost-effective, friendly, end user solution that provides flexibility for each site to automate its cadastral Business processes."

In addition to the work being performed by the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's Office, substantial work by Esri, clients, and Business partners to produce standard data models for the geodatabase (such as the ArcGIS Parcel Data Model) is also under way.

"I am pleased to see Palm Beach County and NovaLIS working toward developing an ArcGIS software-based parcel maintenance solution," says Jack Dangermond, Esri president. "The Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's Office work with NovaLIS and our own technical resources epitomizes the community of professionals that have embraced our newest technologies. Building solutions that put GIS into core Business functions is a long-term goal of ours; NovaLIS is helping implement solutions that take GIS to the very heart of the organization."

The Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's Office has found that default data models provide an excellent starting point for experiencing the geodatabase and establishing the specific requirements of an organization. By using NovaLIS' Parcel Editor 8.1 with the ArcGIS Parcel Data Model, Palm Beach is experiencing the power of both ArcGIS and the geodatabase in a parcel-mapping environment.

For more information, contact Roger Harris, Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's Office, Florida (tel.: 561-355-4698, e-mail: rharris@co.palm-beach.fl.us), or John Enck, Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's Office (tel.: 561-355-4518). Alternately, contact Gary Waters, president/CEO of NovaLIS Technologies (tel.: 866-353-1800, e-mail: gwaters@novalistech.com) or visit the NovaLIS Web site (www.novalistech.com). For more information of ArcGIS Parcel Data Models, visit www.esri.com/software/arcgisdatamodels.