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For the period 1992 to 1998, Hunter GIS was the turnkey GIS Implementation consultant and
strategic business partner to the former Kingston Public Utilities Commision (now Utilities
Department), City of Kingston, Ontario. The Kingston Utilitites Depeartment is a unique
utility with responsibility to supply integrated natural gas, electricity, water and sewer services to
the muncipality.
Hunter GIS provided comprehensive outsourcing and consulting services, including software, hardware, systems networking, data conversion, data integration, application development and technology transfer, for this multi-year GIS implementation.
Work was conducted in stages with Stage I representing the conversion of all existing hard copy and digital documents as mad available.
Successive stages included linkage to corporate customer databases, exception identification, field inspections, scrubbing and complementary population of databases.
Significant milestone deliveries included:
- Historical and new aerial photography and digital orthophotos in 1998.
- City-wide 1:2,000 scale topographic base mapping in vector (CAD) and topological (GIS) formats.
- Parcel and easement mapping linked to Tax Assessment databases for 15,000+ parcels. Data cleaning and exception resolution in progress (Stage V).
- Live and abandoned gas distribution with services linked to Corporate Billing and Meter Mast and Gas Emergency Shutoff databases for 10,000+ customers.
Database cleaning and exception resolution completed (Stage VII). Development of gas
construction history, incident work and management databases. Pipe network modelling in
support of downtown low pressure cast iron replacement program and system load growth expansion.
- Electrical distribution services linked to Corporate Billing and Meter Master databases for
30,000+ customers. Electrical facilities inventories include: circuitry, utility pole an djoint pole usage,
transformers, switches, substations, underground manholes and handholes, and services.
data delivery and exception resolution in progress (Stage III).
Work includes preparation of primary distribution and subtransmission files for SCADA implementation.
- Integration of Road Information Management Systems (RIMS) with single line street network file
for management of construction history and forecast information.
Development of incident and accident database formats.
- Completion of Water (Stage II) distribution databases.
Conversion of existing Water Information Management System (WIMS) databases and card indexes.
Water construction history and breaks database in progress.
- Development of Sewer (Stage II) databases with city-wide implementation in progress.
Comprehensive databasing of sewer infrastructure and exception analysis.
- Development of integrated telecommunications and telephone GIS prototypes for implementation by external agencies.
- Ongoing customer audits (gas, water and electrical) to identify addressing, parcel assessment, metering and corporate billing database inconsistencies and omissions, utilizing GIS/RDBMS (relational database management system) technology (75,000+ meters).
- Support of GIS/RDBMS networked hardware and software for back office data serving.
- Integration of CAD and GIS, and migration of Hunter back office GIS applications to the Corporate Internet.
- Development of one window call center rapid data access solutions for work management tasks on the
Internet (inspections, service orders, one call locate, work performance, capital planning and forecasts).
These GIS datasets operate on individual and networked microcomputers utilizing CAD, GIS and SQL
relation database management software and on corporate and private Extranets/Intranets/Internet.
City-wide GIS datasets have been loaded onto notebook computers for mobile support.
Notebook computers are also utilized for field data collection.
A wide variety of input and output devices are supported.
Individual databases are topologically structured, georeferenced and integrated to permit selective
map-centered querying, data mixing and zoom in/zoom out from scales 1:250 to 1:40,000 for
"one call locate - where to dig", maintenance support, construction drawing preparation and planning purposes.
Back office GIS application development includes automated CAD file and graphic output for "on-demand"
feature-centered map queries, city-wide utility book plots and wall map production for dispatch.
Automated plan and profile analysis and plotting capabilities have been developed.
The award of this multi-year assignment for GIS Implementation recognized the significant
contribution of Hunter GIS professional services to delivery of economical solutions for environmental,
utility and municipal information management.
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