Executive Summary
The collection of data process is performed in several steps, and
previously missing data is added in with each step. In the initial
step, our client acquires a preliminary list of properties from the
city. This list contains the absolute minimum information: location,
jurisdiction, site name (maybe), etc. The amount of data is never
known in advance; volunteers hired by GCP have to go out in the field
to collect additional data at every step. Once the list is obtained
from the city, the volunteers access the city's records to obtain
information on the broker, owner, and any additional information like
the lot size, parcel number, assessor number, and, possibly, the
zoning code. Then the broker is contacted from whom financial and tax
information is acquired. Data on contamination levels, contaminants,
and prior usage of the land is collected from research on the history
of the land, either from the city, owner, or fieldwork, or a
combination of all three.
Needless to say this process is very difficult, and very often very
little data is found on the property because of the lack of
cooperation by the involved entities. Accordingly, we designed our
database to be flexible enough to accommodate the limitations imposed
on our client by her business (e.g., most of the fields in the
property entity have been made to accept null values). In addition,
many concessions were made along the way to ensure data integrity,
both within the database and during the actual data collection and
entry (e.g., relegating a major portion of the lookup tables' data
entry to the administrative back-end to retain absolute control over
the accuracy of these tables). Finally, since our client currently
had no business system in place, we had to actually define the entire
business process (and refine existing elements) for them and also
design each and every user view associated with each step (from data
entry to reports to field data collection forms; please see the
process overview diagram next) from scratch. These userviews will be
implemented by us in the next stage, where we will deliver a
completely functional application (and associated systems) to GCP.
Our client, Gateway Cities Partnership, LLC, is a non-profit
organization that promotes the redevelopment of brownfields in cities
across the state. Our database will be used to store the data
collected by our client on the properties of interest. This database
will be made available to developers who are interested in purchasing
such properties for redevelopment. The database, and the entire
front-end, will be totally web-based.