Progress Case Studies MarkLogic Helps Fairfax County Residents Become More Civic-minded

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	MarkLogic Helps Fairfax County Residents Become More Civic-minded Progress

MarkLogic Helps Fairfax County Residents Become More Civic-minded

Progress

Technology Category	Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
Applicable Industries	Cities & Municipalities
Applicable Functions	Business Operation
Services	System Integration
Challenge	Fairfax County wanted to upgrade their existing Police Events application. This application allowed the public to search, filter, and map police service calls by type, location, and date, and access preliminary police investigation data from Fairfax County's 9-1-1 call center. With more than a half-million data points from all over the county, the data overwhelmed the existing Oracle relational database. The county's GIS database contained data from more than 800 different sources, including libraries, schools, hospitals, most of which have unique schemas, making it difficult to sort through and access. Only a small amount of GIS data was available via the previous Fairfax GIS search application, which was JavaScript-based. This legacy application did not provide the flexibility to constrain searches to specific data layers without customization. The existing database had to search layer by layer, one column at a time, making searches slow and difficult. The county has approximately 800 distinct layers in its GIS database and most have their own specific data schema. For non-GIS staff this can make sifting through all of the information very difficult. The ability to add new datasets as they were identified and provide a set of tools for loading and enrichment was tough. Also, returning information in a variety of formats including JSON, XML, and KML was not possible, and data needed to be RESTful to keep in accordance with current practices. Read More
About Customer	Fairfax County, Virginia is one of the largest counties in the nation, with more than one million residents and a budget larger than that of four states combined. The Fairfax County Department of Information Technology (DIT) uses modern information technologies to improve citizen access to government information and services, including a wide variety of mapping data from the county's geographic information system (GIS). The DIT's goal is to provide the community with convenient access to appropriate information and services through technology. Read More
Solution	Fairfax County wanted to put more geospatial information directly into the hands of county residents. In order to do so, the Police Events app needed an enterprise-grade NoSQL database solution that could handle the volume of data that the old, relational database couldn't. The department tested several NoSQL databases, including various open source solutions. MarkLogic's Enterprise NoSQL database platform outperformed them all, giving Fairfax County DIT the ability to make complicated queries to its GIS database, and making that data easily accessible to users. MarkLogic gave the department the infrastructure it needed to improve query times on GIS database searches, as well as the ability to make more of that data accessible to the public. MarkLogic was an obvious choice for Fairfax County DIT due to its enterprise-level performance, geospatial support, and unrestricted search capabilities across unrelated data in a geographic context. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage

Applicable Industries

Cities & Municipalities

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Services

System Integration

Challenge

Fairfax County wanted to upgrade their existing Police Events application. This application allowed the public to search, filter, and map police service calls by type, location, and date, and access preliminary police investigation data from Fairfax County's 9-1-1 call center. With more than a half-million data points from all over the county, the data overwhelmed the existing Oracle relational database. The county's GIS database contained data from more than 800 different sources, including libraries, schools, hospitals, most of which have unique schemas, making it difficult to sort through and access. Only a small amount of GIS data was available via the previous Fairfax GIS search application, which was JavaScript-based. This legacy application did not provide the flexibility to constrain searches to specific data layers without customization. The existing database had to search layer by layer, one column at a time, making searches slow and difficult. The county has approximately 800 distinct layers in its GIS database and most have their own specific data schema. For non-GIS staff this can make sifting through all of the information very difficult. The ability to add new datasets as they were identified and provide a set of tools for loading and enrichment was tough. Also, returning information in a variety of formats including JSON, XML, and KML was not possible, and data needed to be RESTful to keep in accordance with current practices.

About Customer

Fairfax County, Virginia is one of the largest counties in the nation, with more than one million residents and a budget larger than that of four states combined. The Fairfax County Department of Information Technology (DIT) uses modern information technologies to improve citizen access to government information and services, including a wide variety of mapping data from the county's geographic information system (GIS). The DIT's goal is to provide the community with convenient access to appropriate information and services through technology.

Solution

Fairfax County wanted to put more geospatial information directly into the hands of county residents. In order to do so, the Police Events app needed an enterprise-grade NoSQL database solution that could handle the volume of data that the old, relational database couldn't. The department tested several NoSQL databases, including various open source solutions. MarkLogic's Enterprise NoSQL database platform outperformed them all, giving Fairfax County DIT the ability to make complicated queries to its GIS database, and making that data easily accessible to users. MarkLogic gave the department the infrastructure it needed to improve query times on GIS database searches, as well as the ability to make more of that data accessible to the public. MarkLogic was an obvious choice for Fairfax County DIT due to its enterprise-level performance, geospatial support, and unrestricted search capabilities across unrelated data in a geographic context.

Impact #1	MarkLogic's database houses more than a half-million data points about police events and geography. Querying this data from different sources, integrating with existing IT infrastructure at the time, and storing this information in one place was essential.
Impact #2	MarkLogic was able to sort and search information from several different GIS tools and make individual queries to each, based on a user's search. It was also compatible with Esri, a spatial database engine that stores geospatial information.
Impact #3	County employees and residents now can access real-time information about neighborhood disturbances, thefts, drug or sex offenses, and more, in whichever area they chose.

Impact #1

MarkLogic's database houses more than a half-million data points about police events and geography. Querying this data from different sources, integrating with existing IT infrastructure at the time, and storing this information in one place was essential.

Impact #2

MarkLogic was able to sort and search information from several different GIS tools and make individual queries to each, based on a user's search. It was also compatible with Esri, a spatial database engine that stores geospatial information.

Impact #3

County employees and residents now can access real-time information about neighborhood disturbances, thefts, drug or sex offenses, and more, in whichever area they chose.

Benefit #1	MarkLogic increased the Police Events application's search speed, greatly improving user experience and leading to a massive increase in traffic to the site and usage of the application. The old relational database had to search through data from every tool for each search, causing simple searches to take 10 seconds on average. With MarkLogic, searches are returned in sub-seconds, making the system much more useful for the public.

Benefit #1

MarkLogic increased the Police Events application's search speed, greatly improving user experience and leading to a massive increase in traffic to the site and usage of the application. The old relational database had to search through data from every tool for each search, causing simple searches to take 10 seconds on average. With MarkLogic, searches are returned in sub-seconds, making the system much more useful for the public.

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Overview

MarkLogic Helps Fairfax County Residents Become More Civic-minded

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit