The LINK-GIS website is undergoing a makeover. NKAPC contracted recently with two consulting firms to help its staff upgrade the functionality and look of the site that serves Kenton, Campbell, and Pendleton Counties. The Commission expects to put the new service online by mid fall.
“The website has been online for almost five years,” said Dennis Gordon, FAICP, executive director of the Area Planning Commission. “We were online before MapQuest, Google Maps, and other providers of online mapping popularized the internet as the go-to geographic information source for the masses.”
Gordon suggests the technological and marketing advances pursued by MapQuest and Google have been a mixed blessing.
“Our website gets more hits now than at any time in its history,” he said. “It’s rewarding to see so many more citizens using the service but frustrating to hear their comparisons of our site’s functionality with what’s being provided by the big guys. This makeover is intended to improve that.”
According to Gordon, the website has always provided considerably more information in a more detailed form than that provided by the major online companies. This, he suggests, is due to the different goals of those providing online geographic information.
“MapQuest’s and Google’s primary goal is to help users find locations and to get from Point A to Point B… and they do it extremely well,” he said. “LINK-GIS’ primary goals are to serve the much more detailed needs of local, state, and federal governments and to provide critical data analysis for local utility providers, economic development officials, and schools.”
Gordon points out quickly that LINK-GIS will also help users find locations and to get from Point A to Point B. It just does it in a much more detailed format.
“Our goal with this makeover is to give our citizens easy access to much of the same detailed information that is used by their local governments,” he concluded.
The LINK-GIS website is available at linkgis.org.
NKAPC provides comprehensive GIS mapping services to Kenton and Campbell Counties through interlocal agreements with the two fiscal courts, SD1, the Northern Kentucky Water District, and Mark Vogt and Daniel Braun, the respective Kenton and Campbell County PVAs. It provides limited GIS mapping services to Pendleton County through an agreement with the fiscal court.