DOCgis

Development

Department of Conservation began developing the Biodiversity Information Platform during 2000/01 to make biodiversity and other conservation information available more widely. Its annual report recorded a planned Bay of Plenty pilot in August 2001. By 2003 the work had become a National Enterprise GIS, with DOCgis as the intranet and extranet application lineage. The departmental spatial-information, information-management, database and application teams assembled the service for a national organisation with staff working in widely separated offices.

The 2003 technical paper records an existing HTML Version 1.0, a Version 2.0 milestone in June and a Java-client milestone planned for August. The later Release II training guide describes an operational service and credits the Science and Technology & Information Services Division, Information Management Unit and Spatial Information Management at Head Office. Duane Wilkins’s continuing ArcSDE, ArcIMS, training and online-mapping work is documented from October 2003. The early release milestones precede that recorded involvement.

The records identify the contributing departmental units but do not establish a complete roster of individual developers. Duane Wilkins's documented continuing development begins after October 2003 and is kept separate from the initial June and August releases.

Architecture

A national geodatabase and ArcSDE managed spatial information centrally, with SQL Server in the documented environment. ArcGIS supported specialist desktop work. ArcIMS supplied browser maps through HTML and Java clients, including stored queries, national geodatabase layers, eight-bit PNG map images and access to non-spatial business databases. Linking operational attributes to their business systems helped keep the geographic view connected with information maintained elsewhere in the department.

Browser delivery suited remote offices with older computers and slow or dial-up connections. Much of the processing stayed on the server, and ordinary desktops received the map and selected functions. Specialist staff continued to use richer desktop tools. GPS, ArcPad and Windows CE work extended the information environment towards field capture. Requirements modelling, prototypes, user testing and successive iterations formed part of the development approach described in the technical record.

Continuing use

Steven Li’s 2009 Massey University thesis examines systems integration in an agency whose applications include DOCgis and Bioweb, identifying the Department of Conservation setting through the named systems. It describes problems created by copying and reconciling information between applications. Connections between geographic records and operational databases reduced duplicated business data while increasing the need to maintain identifiers and interfaces.

On 24 August 2009 DOC’s public explanation of GIS described conservancy specialists contributing local information to a national system. DOC estimated that almost 90 per cent of the data it collected had a geospatial aspect and directed readers to interactive DOCgis maps. A DOCgis print dated 12 February 2013, reproduced in the New Zealand Conservation Authority’s June 2015 public papers, shows continuing use with biodiversity, asset, permission, conservation-unit and other operational layers. Later staff material also records everyday tasks involving Treaty settlement information, Te Araroa, boundaries and functional-location identifiers.