About the Growth Management's Site
History
The Website for the Department of Growth Management started in Spring of 2001 as part of the foundations of the GIS Division. From start, it was built on Free and Open Source products and it was carefully designed to accommodate future growth of e-services. As of July 2008, the Growth Management's site consists of a collection of several independent sites. Over the last six years, these sites have accommodated major GeoWeb Applications in support of all County Departments and the general public. Each of these GeoWeb Applications has been architectured as self-sustained. Each of them depends on its own customized set of data and on its own development environment. Collectively they offer 45+ customized e-services.
Statistics
For the last two years, the average number of pages viewed in all of our sites have been stable at 140,000 per month. Visits are at around 14,000 per month. In each visit the average number of pages viewed is 10. Around 6,600 pages per month are viewed by County Departments including the 5 Divisions at the Growth Management. The average free downloads of our Maps, GIS and non GIS data, CDs, staff reports, application forms, studies, etc., exceeds 5,000 per month. Daily transactions are at an average of 900. A transaction defined as a process when users conduct business online on their own, which would have otherwise required county staff time of at least 10-15 minutes. These statistics are based on the Advanced Web Statistics (AWStats) Free Open Source software.
Overview
The GeoWeb Applications served in our sites, which commercial value has exceeded 1.5 million USD, have been conceived and developed entirely in house at the Growth Management Department. Just like the website, these GeoWeb Applications have been mostly built upon Free/Libre and Open Source products and for that reason are fully owned by Alachua County. None of them has required any dedicated county budget allocation. Some of them have been developed with grant funding from the Florida State Department and many of them have benefited financially and professionally from partnerships with other public agencies. None of them requires payment of monthly fees, nor has any user number license limitations. Many of the GeoWeb Applications that our sites are hosting have won National and International Awards and have been published in a number of International Gray Literature publications. Click for a list of recognitions, and Google for a list of publications.
Contributions
A good number of colleagues have contributed in the development of our sites over the years.
Some with compensation, many as volunteers. Some have left, others remain. Following are names of
major contributors in chronological order:
Al Ho, Robin Grunwald, Jennifer Monroe,
Xiaowen Yang, Feng Han, Michael Ripley, Michael Sandford, Toni Staudenmaier, Gabrielle Smith,
Rosanna Rivero, Sue Ann Panton, Yongseok Jang,
Sean Conner, Matthew Muller, Odenis Vitorelli, James Collins, Robert Jensen, Roshan Pande-Chhetri,
Timothy Clark in an outstanding way,
and Juna Papajorgji.
Crucial supporters and partners in the development of a number of these sites include:
Florida State Department, Division of Historical Resources; Florida Historical Commission;
Florida Historical Society; Florida Museum of Natural History;
Florida state representatives and senators: Betty Holzendorf, Debbie Boyd, Ed Jennings,
JD Alexander, Lisa Carlton,
Michael Bennet, Paula Dockery, Richard Mitchell, Rod Smith;
Board of Alachua County Commission; Alachua County Historic Commission;
School Board of Alachua County;
City of Gainesville, Department of Cultural Affairs; City of Leesburg, Planning Department;
City of Lakeland, Planning Department; City of Sarasota, Planning Department;
University of Florida, Urban and Regional Planning Department;
University of California, Davis, Information Center for the Environment.
The loyal support and feedback from our numerous users over the years, has helped us refine and
improve constantly on these sites.
Click to view local users input on our historical sites, view
global users interest
in our products, see
users input
on our activities archived by year, or explore
use of our e-services archived by year.
Technical Specifications
Our websites are hosted in a designated server of Alachua County which uses Microsoft IIS 5.2 web server, Apache web server, Appache Tomcat. Webpages are written in the PHP 5.2.1 scripting language and use the MySQL 5 database. GIS and RDBMS data are stored in a separate server. RDBMS data is stored in Oracle 10g, Geospatial data is stored in ArcSDE. Both data are displayed in real time. GeoWeb Applications use either of the following Internet Map Servers based on their corresponding site design: Jshape, MapServer, p.mapper framework, ArcIMS, the ArcEngine. Webpages have been coded by hand using the free careware Arachnophilia. The framework of the user interface has been prepared at the County's ITS Department.
Our sites are best viewed with Internet Explorer 6 and a screen resolution of at least 800 X 600 pixels. Other compatible browsers include Netscape 6.0, Mozilla 1.6, and Firefox 0.9.1 or better. Many files require the Adobe Reader for viewing, which can be downloaded here.
Website Contact
Send questions, suggestions, or criticisms to our Systems Analyst Timothy Clark, tclark@alachua.fl.us.
