Kentucky Transportation Cabinet Migrates Enterprise Highway Database

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (Cabinet) and Exor Corp., announced the successful migration of the Cabinet's statewide integrated highway inventory database Highway Information System (HIS) to Exor version 3.2. The Cabinet now maintains its official statewide road inventory and GIS transportation map layer in the new system.

This marks the culmination of a number of projects by the Division of Planning and the Division of Technology to improve the quality of data available to Cabinet planners and decision makers, including a GPS survey to create a base map of more than 77,000 miles of roads in 120 counties with a spatial accuracy of two meters. The Division of Planning integrated this spatial data to information within Cabinet databases creating an accurate, up-to-date, digital highway network that meets Cabinet needs for highway analysis and information-driven mapping, and now uses Exor to maintain this integration.

The Cabinet took the opportunity to update and improve the quality of the road inventory database and to migrate reports and applications to the new system. The integrated map-based editing environment and extensive data validation functionality enables Cabinet staff members to maintain the improved data quality standards, and to build up a historic database.

"Enabling our staff to maintain the highway GIS network and associated assets within a single application," said Greg Witt, assistant director, Division of Planning at Kentucky, "enables us to merge two separate processes into a single, synchronized, process, simplifying workflow and improving data integrity, reporting and analysis.

"The establishment of a complete transportation network and the migration to a current release of Oracle will afford the Transportation Cabinet the opportunity to continue building an enterprise data system. This will further enhance our capacity to develop links to existing and developing data systems, produce up-to-date data driven maps, and support a number of efforts underway by the Cabinet in the area of transportation planning and analysis."

The Cabinet will no longer need two separate groups to maintain separate tabular and spatial roadway inventory databases, and they will no longer have to periodically synchronize the two. Cabinet organization and maintenance procedures are being restructured around the new, simpler, integrated data maintenance environment. The new spatially enabled HIS provides the foundation for all Cabinet GIS activities as well as various aspatial reports and applications.