As a new member of the GIS Consortium, the top priority in Lake Forest has been getting data ready for New World. New World used in some of the other Consortium communities, is a CAD software that uses GIS to map out the location of where calls are coming from.

Lake Forest is responsible for dispatching calls for both Police and Fire for the city, as well as the surrounding communities of Highwood for Police and Lake Bluff and Knollwood for Fire. Since there were many detailed paper maps on hand, having this data available at the dispatchers’ fingertips will greatly improve efficiency and response time. There will also be a version of New World running on Toughbook laptops that will be in the emergency vehicles to assist in giving address locations.

Much of the data being used for this implementation was updated and standardized before it was ready to be loaded onto the test server. Once the data is running live, edits will be carried out by Specialists and can be loaded into the active map to keep updates being entered as soon as they come in.

In preparing the data for the New World project, we now have many of the key layers needed for the GISC data conversion out of the way, and this will aid in our progress of delivering MapOffice to Lake Forest employees as soon as possible.