CivicMapper developed the IW Field Map web mapping application on behalf of ALCOSAN’s Industrial Waste (IW) department. The application’s purposes is to enable IW staff to view and access their own permit, sampling, and inspection data that is stored in another vendor’s database alongside the 3 Rivers Wet Weather regional wastewater infrastructure geodata. Previously, this was not possible, as the other vendor’s data was non-spatial and only accessible through their software.

CivicMapper coordinated with that vendor to make their datasets available, and then built an Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) service to push it to the web application’s PostgreSQL/PostGIS database. Then, following the Open API-spec, we built a HTTP ReST API to facilitate access to that data. The map was designed with field staff so that it would provide critical information they needed in the field with the fewest clicks. To that end, we undertook development iteratively, and conducted user testing early and often.

The application was built with proven open source technologies including Leaflet, PostgreSQL PostGIS, Bootstrap, and Flask, in order to prevent vendor lock-in while providing a robust, enterprise-grade web application.