Technologies Used
Overview
A heritage consulting firm in NSW, Australia regularly orders AHIMS (Aboriginal Heritage Information Management System) site cards for their projects. Each site card costs $50 to order from Heritage NSW, and the firm was frequently ordering duplicate cards due to poor organization and lack of visibility into their existing card inventory. Site cards were scattered across various folders with inconsistent naming conventions, making it nearly impossible to quickly determine if a card had already been ordered.
The Challenge
The firm had accumulated hundreds of AHIMS site cards over years of projects, but they were disorganized and difficult to search. Before ordering new cards for a project, staff had to manually search through multiple folders, trying to remember or guess file naming patterns. This process was time-consuming and often unsuccessful, leading to duplicate orders. Each duplicate represented a $50 waste. Additionally, there was no spatial visualization of site card coverage, making it difficult to understand which areas had been surveyed and which required new assessments.
Our Solution
We developed a comprehensive GIS-based management system for AHIMS site cards. The platform automatically organizes site cards into intelligently prefixed folders based on location and project metadata, provides a searchable database with full-text search across all card content, displays site cards on an interactive map using Leaflet, showing spatial coverage at a glance, and uses AI to extract and structure key information from site cards (location coordinates, site types, significance assessments). Before ordering new cards, staff can quickly search by location or site ID to check existing inventory. The PostGIS-enabled PostgreSQL database enables sophisticated spatial queries, such as finding all site cards within a specific radius or project boundary. The React interface provides an intuitive experience for both searching and visualizing heritage sites.
Results & Impact
- Eliminated duplicate site card orders, saving thousands of dollars annually in unnecessary fees
- Dramatically reduced site card search time
- Improved project planning with spatial visualization of heritage site coverage
- Enhanced compliance and reporting with structured, searchable site card data
- Enabled rapid response to client inquiries about heritage sites in specific areas