LOJIC wins international award

The Louisville/Jefferson County Information Consortium (LOJIC) recently received an international award from Esri, a leading geographic information system (GIS) company.

LOJIC is a multi-agency partnership created to build and maintain a GIS for Jefferson County. LOJIC’s core members are Louisville/Jefferson County Metro Government, Louisville Water, Louisville MSD, and the Jefferson County Property Valuation Administration.

Esri founder Jack Dangermond presented the Enterprise GIS Award to LOJIC during the opening session of the 2021 Esri International User Conference. Dangermond’s presentation cited LOJIC’s 30-plus year history of collaboration and its model interagency partnership as well as its vast collection of geospatial data and applications.

An Esri news release noted that the Enterprise GIS Award was presented to LOJIC “for bringing together decision makers to understand the interconnection of systems within their region and share data and applications across 1,300 spatial databases.”

The four partners that comprise LOJIC have leveraged GIS for office applications, field work, asset management, citizen engagement, emergency response, and fair and equitable property assessments.

According to Dan Lambert, Louisville Water GIS Supervisor, “Louisville Water uses the partnership’s shared data in ways that cost much less than if we tried to source and maintain the data ourselves. LOJIC provides the spatial foundation on which Louisville Water’s GIS is built.”

Lambert and James Bates, Director of Infrastructure Planning and Records, pointed out that LOJIC data on buildings, roads, elevations, streets, and site addresses serves as the basis for Louisville Water’s pipeline mapping and numerous applications.

Such applications as SPIN and KloudGin as well as such analytics as hydraulic modeling combine LOJIC’s multiple datasets with Louisville Water’s data to help employees across the company do their jobs effectively.

Lambert also pointed out that “while LOJIC was created to build and maintain GIS data for Jefferson County, it now also builds and maintains GIS data for Oldham and Bullitt Counties as well. This data is used by Louisville Water for the portions of our service area outside of Jefferson County in much the same ways as the Jefferson County GIS data.”

Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer accepted the Enterprise GIS Award on behalf of the LOJIC partners. He said the partnership and its multiple uses of GIS data changed how local business is conducted and improved services to local citizens. Mayor Fischer also pointed out several important recent uses of LOJIC including monitoring and reporting activities related to the COVID-19 pandemic and advancing social equity in local planning and economic development.

As an Enterprise GIS Award winner, LOJIC joins a list of advanced GIS-based initiatives around the globe. Other winners in recent years include the Qatar Centre for GIS, the Singapore Geospatial Collaborative Environment, the Hong Kong Lands Department, Royal Dutch Shell, Irish Water, Washington D.C. GIS, and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.