The Geographic Information System (GIS) division of the Planning Department houses and maintains spatial and tabular information about various items in Rome and Floyd County. Under the direction of the GIS / GPS Manager, the department assimilates data from various city and county departments and publishes them as an aggregate entity. The data are used by other departments and the public to verify important information about locations in Rome and Floyd County, such as zoning, property owner, city limit boundary, etc. Analysis of the data is also performed to check for various government related functions on an as needed basis.
The Rome / Floyd County GIS uses ESRI software to create and maintain its geographic data. All data are stored as either ArcView shapefile or geodatabase files. Databases in various other file formats, such as dBase, Access or delimited ASCII are also linked to the spatial data. Raster data are stored as georeferenced TIFF, MrSID or ESRI grid format files. All data that originates from the department are in datum NAD83 feet, State Plane Coordinates, zone Georgia West.
GIS data is available to city / county employees from a centralized server via the intranet on a browser based program utilizing internet mapping service (ArcIMS) software. A wealth of GIS data is also available to the public. Bulk or customized distribution of data to other GIS professionals will be considered on a case by case basis. Please see the fee schedule for pricing of digital data and printed maps.
Global Positioning System (GPS) is a service that utilizes a special receiving unit to determine the location of any point on the globe. A series of twenty four satellites transmit signals to the receiver and through a series of trigonometric functions calculates the coordinates. Originally launched to facilitate the U.S. military, the system was later declassified and made available to the civilian pulic. The City of Rome also maintains a differential GPS station which broadcasts a correction signal to increase the accuracy of GPS receivers.
What is GIS?
GIS or Geographic Information System is a set of digital maps with tabular data in the form of databases attached to them. Other databases can also be linked to the items on the map. Analysis can then be performed on either the spatial or tabular data or on both. The results of a query can be saved as a spatial data subset and be used with other spatial or tabular data to perform more analysis, resulting in a number of possibilities for various "what if" scenarios. Spatial queries may include proximities, contiguities, inclusions, exclusions or integrations.