Cobb County provides a variety of maps to encourage community engagement and innovation. We have moved beyond the normal desktop GIS to a full mobile deployment for use on smartphones and tablets in the field.

Disclaimer: It is the user’s responsibility to verify any information derived from the GIS data before making any decisions or taking any actions based on the information. Cobb County is not liable for any errors in the GIS data and assumes no legal responsibility for this information.

Mission and Organization

The mission of Cobb County's Geographic Information System (GIS) is to create, operate, and maintain an efficient, cost-effective geographic information system through the use of specialized computer, mapping and digital aerial photography technologies in support of the Board of Commissioners, elected officials, and county departments.

Cobb's GIS will collaborate with other government and non-government entities to provide responsive and useful location-based services to customers.

The GIS is organized as a balanced, distributed system, with both county departments and a central GIS core group working together to ensure the effectiveness of GIS.

The majority of spatial database development, maintenance, analyses, and mapping take place within the departments. The county departments have the flexibility to organize their departmental GIS units to meet their mission goals and fulfill their commitments to the countywide GIS.

Current Projects

• Integrate GIS citizen reporting and feedback through mobile technologies.
• Development of mobile, desktop and Web-based GIS applications to enhance staff and public access to geospatial data.
• Ongoing digital GIS updates to over 400 GIS datasets including: Parcels, Transportation Networks, Water Utilities, Land Management, Zoning, Addressing and many others.
• Integration of GIS and GPS with various permitting and asset management business applications to streamline workflow.

Future Goals

• Continue update of four cornerstone layers (digital orthophoto base map, 2-foot contours, parcels, and transportation network) and other enterprise GIS databases.
• Develop additional mobile map applications to facilitate varying staff and citizen GIS needs.

A Geographic Information System (GIS) uses computers and software to map and analyze places and events on the earth's surface. GIS allows a person to view, understand, question, interpret and visualize data in ways that are not possible by simply reading a report or examining figures found in the rows and columns of a spreadsheet.

Nearly all county government information has a geographic component to it. Examples of this include a property's address, a manhole location, a street, and a city's jurisdictional boundary. GIS consolidates and integrates all this diverse information so it can be managed more effectively and efficiently.

Interpret and Visualize Data – identify relationships, patterns, or trends

Model Scenarios - test various hypotheses and see outcomes visually

Integrate Systems – bring together disparate data and technology

Facilitate and Improve Decision-Making – include geography

A GIS can be particularly effective as a decision-making tool in such areas as:

• Economic development analysis
• Management of the environment and natural resources
• Infrastructure management - transportation, water and sewer
• Property records management
• Comprehensive planning and zoning
• Public Safety - fire and police

A GIS can help answer spatial analysis questions:

• Where is a particular feature? (facility, hydrant, parcel, street, etc.)
• What features are within x-number of feet or miles of this other feature?
• How many linear miles of roads will be resurfaced?
• What is the shortest route between this location and another?
• What is the fastest route?
• Where is the nearest police or fire unit that can respond?

Most digital orthophoto imagery is captured from aerial photography. Scanned images are rectified to remove distortion so the images are at a consistent map scale. Three types of distortion are removed. Distortion caused by the camera angle and distortion caused by the camera lens.

A digital terrain model is used to remove distortion caused by a landscape's terrain. A typical orthophoto project consists of hundreds of photographs that have been rectified and mosaicked together. Mosaicking involves balancing adjacent photographs' radiometry, which refers to an image's color, brightness and contrast.

Cobb County has a distributed GIS organization structure, which allows GIS professionals to work closely with subject matter experts. The following list is provided to help our customers locate appropriate contact information by key topics.