Amristar has been providing the Housing Assets Geographic Information System (HAGIS) to the Department of Communities since 2008 in order for them to visualise their asset information.
Background
The Department of Communities works to provide West Australians with affordable land and housing opportunities to low income groups, assists with housing finance, provides rental assistance and provides government employees in regional areas with quality homes.
When the Department first engaged Amristar, it had no internal GIS capability of its own, with much of the Department’s asset data was stored as rows of text in legacy systems. The Department required the ability to visualise this data against an authoritative base maps in such a way that both staff and executives could easily navigate and interrogate.
The Mapworks Solution
The project began in 2008 as a pilot Web Mapping application incorporating simple viewing of assets from the (former) Department of Housing and Works on an iDelve map (now called Mapworks). Amristar developed complex geocoding rules in order to match the Department’s text based data extracts to the authoritative Landgate Tenure datasets. This allowed the visualisation of the Department’s assets in the context of each other and of other data taken from Landgate’s Shared Land Information System (SLIP). Amristar also developed the capability to instantaneously toggle the styling of asset layers based on predefined fields, allowing for business insights to be drawn from the mapping platform.
Since then, the popularity and functionality of HAGIS continues to grow and Amristar has been constantly engaged to include a plethora of new capabilities to HAGIS. The system, now upgraded to our cross-platform technology, includes automated data updates from SLIP, geocoding of property assets, dynamic layer adding, mark-up capabilities, smart search tools, group based security and cartographic-quality high resolution PDF print outs. The latest version of HAGIS is also hosted in the Cloud using Microsoft Azure Container Hosting Services.
Business Outcomes
The HAGIS project is one of Amristar’s longest running projects. It demonstrates Amristar’s ability to overcome significant technical challenges and develop applications that the client continues to draw benefit from over long periods of time. The application is a core, line of business system with around 4,000 users. The continual request for extensions to the system is proof of the client’s satisfaction with both the business outcomes and the value that Amristar provides.
