Maine Office of GIS Undertakes Major New Initiatives

By Dan Walters

July 1 brought a brand new state fiscal year and the Office of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has started work on several initiatives aimed at improving GIS products and services. The initiatives involve major enhancements to the state’s GIS basemap and the implementation of new technology to improve access for state agencies and the public.

Since July of 1999 a subcommittee of state and federal GIS users have been meeting to discuss needed improvements to the hydrography layer. The discussions have been quite broad, but emergency management applications, including; dam safety and inundation mapping, water quality modeling, and enhanced cartography are good examples of the types of applications agencies are expecting to develop that require implementation of both spatial and attribute enhancements. Once the proposed work is completed, users can expect ponds, rivers, stream and coastline to be edgematched and combined into a single hydrography layer. The layer will have a number of important attributes including the MIDAS number and feature name. A flow-based reduced single line representation will also be developed to permit modeling and watershed analysis.

A pilot project covering the Sheepscot watershed was initiated to scope out the necessary work. During the course of this work, discussions continued with the US Geological Survey Water Resources Division about their work to construct a GIS based National Hydrography Database (NHD) using 1:24,000 scale data. The results of the pilot project and discussions have led to a cooperative agreement with the USGS to expand the pilot area and enhance the data to NHD specifications. If successful and funding is available, USGS and OGIS hope to amend the cooperative agreement to include the rest of the state.

The Emergency Services Communication Bureau (ESCB) and OGIS are rapidly concluding their work with towns to create consistent and comprehensive physical addresses for emergency services. This huge project is scheduled to end in 2001. GIS data resulting from this project will be maintained to further extend the usefulness of this project and to possibly support map assisted dispatch at the public safety answering points.

Users can expect the GIS data to contain a complete road network including both public and private roads that are part of a town’s emergency response road network. Each road segment will have the correct road name and address range. These bits of GIS information give agency programs powerful "geocoding" and spatial analysis capability.

More than 200 towns have now been through the addressing project and OGIS is finalizing this data for release to the public. Technicians will perform a final check of the spatial and attribute data to uncover any problems that may not have been resolved during the addressing project. Feature level attribute fields are also being added that will tell users the source of the feature, method of digitization and when it was last updated. This information will facilitate use of the data and streamline data management activities. Finally, ESCB, OGIS and the Department of Transportation are studying the feasibility of adding DOT TINIS node numbers and selected attributes to the E911 road centerline data. These agencies are also examining a method to jointly maintain this data and provide all interested parties direct access to the most current road centerline databases.

GIS data like road centerlines, hydrography and town boundaries change over time and the State of Maine is making the commitment to keep these layers up-to-date to serve state programs and the public. However, these databases are very large and some change very rapidly and require a high level of technical capacity to manage and serve. This technology barrier precludes effective usage of these data in many cases. The five-year Strategic Plan for GIS aims to overcome these barriers and make "GIS more accessible and easier to use". Regardless of the technical challenges, big and small agencies need access to the most current data available to make sound and timely decisions.

The Office of GIS and our GIS Executive Council partners intend to meet this challenge by implementing new spatial database management and application software. OGIS has recently purchased and loaded ESRI’s Spatial Data Engine (SDE) and Internet Mapping Software (ArcIMS), and both are being tested this year with several pilot projects. SDE is being used to support a client/provider application for the Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse and finalized E911 road centerline data is being added to SDE to support maintenance and generation of map books. The new hydrography database discussed above will also be tested in the SDE environment. In addition, the Departments of Marine Resources and Environment Protection will test ArcIMS applications later this year.

The "common infrastructure" to support this work will unfold over the next two years. SDE will help us manage and provide access to multipurpose data from a central location. This will allow agencies to access the most current data without having the burden of managing these complex databases. This not only improves access to data, but also reduces our overall data management costs. ArcIMS will extend GIS capability to agency staff that do not have desktop GIS software and allow us to more easily interconnect those that do. ArcIMS and SDE will also permit us to improve public access to agency generated geographic data.

Go to the OGIS website http://apollo.ogis.state.me.us/ for more information.

Dan Walters is the Director of the Office of Geographic Information Systems. He may be reached with comments and questions by e-mailing dan.walters@state.me.us.

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