 As mandated by the State of Texas to be the GIS coordinator for our 16-county region, our goal is to promote the interaction and cooperation of all GIS professionals within the region. Some of the ways we are accomplishing this goal is through quarterly meetings of GIS professionals. These meetings are organized and sponsored by NCTCOG and allow other organizations, such as local governments, universities, private sector companies and software vendors a central meeting place to disseminate information. We also offer ESRI-certified training both at the NCTCOG offices and on-site (through special arrangement). NCTCOG's GIS Data Clearinghouse contains free, downloadable GIS files such as roads, hydrology, railroads, jurisdictional and political boundaries, Traffic Survey Zones, city and county limits, and more.
As 911 Coordinators for the 13 of the 16 counties within our region, our job is to assist these counties and their municipalities in administering and developing their 911 GIS applications and to assist in creating highly accurate basemaps for those applications. In addition to roads, hydrology and railroads layers, we are beginning to develop a base of household point locations to better facilitate emergency response efforts.
Once every two years, NCTCOG facilitates the purchase of high-quality aerial images and digital elevation contours of North Central Texas. The digital imagery are available for purchase by our members at a much-reduced cost over each entity having to order the photography on their own, and the resulting images are made available for viewing and printing on www.dfwmaps.com.
NCTCOG is also integrating GIS into its traveling modeling process. GIS is currently being used for network coding and editing, development of focused study areas, geocoding large numbers of locations identified in various surveys, and locating traffic counts on the modeling network. The purpose of geocoding this information is to calibrate the model for current travel patterns and traffic volumes. Some of the applications for these data are:
- Spatially selecting subsets of data for modification
- Creating travel time contours
- Answering requests for information concerning traffic counts, transportation improvement projects, and roadway attributes such as number of lanes, capacities, forecast volumes, and speeds
NCTCOG's GIS projects and our demographic research are also closely aligned. We are currently gathering data to create parcel-based land use, and GIS plays a major role in allocating data for our demographic forecasts. The culmination of our demographic research combined with GIS technology can be seen at www.dfwmaps.com.
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