The City of Chicago wanted to modernize and improve the overall quality of the City’s GIS database by upgrading the Esri Software, evaluating and assessing the database contents, structure, accuracy, currency and relevance of the data. In addition, the various software tools and processes that are used to manage and maintain the data needed to be evaluated as well.

The first step in the process was to build a custom tool to examine the database and come up with a list of recommendations for improvements. The tool generated documents and spreadsheets that listed out depreciated data types, empty tables, tables without primary keys, tables without indexes, spatial data projections, etc. Additionally, Great Arc plans to work with and interview the City GIS Staff as well as the data stakeholders as part of the project. The results of these interviews will then be incorporated into the final data plan.

The final step in the project will be to upgrade the database from ArcGIS Version 9.3 to ArcGIS 10.X. During the database upgrade, the various recommendations that are approved from the initial task will be implemented. Additionally, data validation scripts and procedures will be executed pre and post upgrade to ensure that all of the data is successfully upgraded to the 10.X version of the software.