Coordinating the planning process across multiple agencies and the wide range of issues in the Melbourne Central Area is complicated. One of the issues is coordinating and understanding the data collected, analyses performed and plans prepared by the various agencies. The goal of this project was to allow the storage and analysis of a wide range of land use and transport data pertaining to the central area of Melbourne. The system aims to provide a central point of access to the data and the metadata, with a unified approach to indexing, searching and presenting the information.
- The system was designed through consultation with road and public transport planners in a variety of agencies, including VicRoads, the Department of Infrastructure, Melbourne City Council, PT operators and toll companies
- Brings together data from a wide range of source formats – covering everything from parking supply, land use and demographics, road design plans, travel survey analysis, model results and planning reports.
- Integrates with the micro-simulation model inputs and outputs to give an easy way for planners to understand the assumptions and investigate the outputs of the models without leaving the system
- Uses an embedded GIS window to show all network data and overlay with demographic and other spatial data
- Deals with zoning systems, and automatically converts between zoning systems, allowing block level data to be compared with suburb level data
- Stores Metadata that is compatible with the ANZLIC standard
- Uses a customisable XML data description language for processing structure text formats
- XSLT used to present XML metadata in an integrated web browser
- Object Relational Layer written in C# with multiple SQL backend, heavy use of attributes and reflection
- Uses IBM’s DB2 database and ESRI’s ArcInfo GIS
- Client application written in C#, with local data caching and an embedded GIS window