A Visit to Chelmsford Town Hall

I stopped by Chelmsford Town Hall this morning to get an update on some of the great things the town's engineering department is doing with GIS (which stands for Geographic Information System). With GIS, a town can integrate records from almost every department to provide "one-stop shopping" for land related information.

More than ten years ago we first got interested in GIS but the technology and the electronic infrastructure was insufficient to do anything meaningful. But now, the cost has gone down and the capacity has gone up so we'll be revisiting GIS as a part of the registry. The first project I envision is converting copies of all of our subdivision plans into transparent digital overlays and then attaching them to a map of the area (of the Google maps variety). Once finished, if you were looking for a subdivision plan about a particular point on the ground, you could simply find that point on the computerized map and the subdivision plan overlays would show you which subdivision plans covered that particular lot. This is still just in the idea stage, but it certainly seems feasible.