Parish GIS team outlines new public data hub and elevation profile tool

Louis Martinez, who presented the report for the parish GIS department, told the council the parish GIS has matured after 15 years and the department is shifting from data-building to delivering tools and applications for other departments and the public.

Martinez said the parish has invested heavily in the system and plans to introduce monitoring software to show performance and downtime, a public GIS data hub for users to download parcel, street and zoning data, and an elevation-profile viewer that lets users click along a line on the map to view topographic profiles based on parish lidar.

"We can look at the response time, how long it took to pull the data in," Martinez said, describing monitoring screens. He added the hub will be a "one stop shop" for maps and datasets, and said the elevation-profile tool will accept user-uploaded spreadsheets of coordinates and elevations for quick visualization. Martinez also noted the elevation data will be a parish-owned lidar product and not third-party map tiles.

Council members praised the tools. Councilman Pellier said the elevation viewer "would be very helpful to a lot of people" and asked when it would be available; Martinez said the viewer is ready and he expects to launch the hub soon. Parish President Jewell and others thanked Martinez and his team for their work and emphasized the importance of keeping field-updated data current.

The presentation noted ongoing tasks such as drainage mapping, servitude/utility servitude research and continued road, address and parcel updates. Martinez said the public-hub launch should reduce records requests and make common datasets available for the public and internal departments.