Friday, Dec. 5, 2008

HCD Recognized for Two GIS Excellence Awards

The Fairfax County Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) was selected the winner of two awards at the county’s annual 2008 Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Excellence Award ceremony held on Wednesday, Nov. 19 at the Fairfax County Government Center. HCD, represented by Krystal Workman and Diane Jenkins, was selected as the winner for the Most Significant Progress in the use of GIS technology for spatial analysis and high quality maps detailing the agency’s activities and assets.  Krystal, GIS Spatial Analyst for HCD, also was awarded first place for Best GIS Cartographic Product for her map showing net residential foreclosures in the county by subdivision using a 3-D cartographic representation of the foreclosure intensity.  In addition, HCD won the People’s Choice Award for Best Exhibit and Best Map. HCD’s exhibit featured various maps used in recent projects, such as Crescent, Wedgewood, the Residences at the Government Center, foreclosure analysis, NEPA reviews, and FCRHA affordable rental properties.

The GIS Excellence Awards recognizes individual county employees, teams and departments, who have demonstrated exceptional utilization of GIS to improve business processes, perform geographic analysis, visualize projects and improve efficiency. The awards have two categories recognizing individual and/or team accomplishments and five categories recognizing agency accomplishments.

GIS Day is a global event and several county exhibitors showcased their achievements to educate the public on the many uses of GIS technologies in their agency with live demonstrations of GIS products, services, and “internal” business processes, and the GIS excellence awards gallery of maps. Over 200 people registered to attended the county’s GIS Day event.