Melissa Johnson shares what GIS is all about

Melissa Johnson sits in her Cole County Courthouse basement office.
Melissa Johnson sits in her Cole County Courthouse basement office.

Have you ever wondered where your school district boundaries are? Or what voting precinct you live in? Or who owns that property down the street? Or where the city buses run in Jefferson City?

These questions and dozens more can be answered more easily - not with a trip to Jefferson City Hall or the Cole County Courthouse, but by letting your fingers do the tapping on your keyboard.

Although it's been around for nearly a decade, many people still don't know all the ways midmogis.org can help them out.

The site is the result of a cooperative partnership between the county and city and features an interactive map where users can find geographic information.

Throughout this month, there have been efforts to get the word out about what Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offers.

Cole County GIS Manager Melissa Johnson said GIS allows for the capturing, storing, analyzing and displaying of geographic information. Various types of analysis can be performed and visually displayed through overlaying, merging or joining different types of spatial and tabular data layers.

"GIS is used in many aspects of county and city day-to-day business," she said. "It is used for planning and development, emergency services, public safety, property assessment, as well as displaying school, fire and voting districts."

Johnson started working with the county in 2004 in the assessor's office, where she worked to start the transition to GIS.

"We had some GIS stuff such as information on roads, but we didn't have it for assessment material, and that's pretty much the backbone of a lot of the stuff we do," she said.

Johnson said she often hears from residents and businesses outside the county asking if their counties have a similar GIS system, and most of the time the answer is no.

"They say they use this all the time; I really wish these other counties would have something like this," she said.

One of the biggest users of GIS is real estate agents, who use it in their daily work.

"If we have a problem with the site, I hear about it from them very quickly," she said. "Many jobs now require you to have some GIS knowledge."