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A Publication Featuring The Information Services Technology of Maine State Government
| Volume IV, Issue 10 | October 2001 |
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By Dan Walters and David Kirouac
The Maine Office of GIS (MEGIS) is currently in the second year of a 5-year statewide GIS strategic plan. The 5-year strategic plan, and its associated implementation plan have been endorsed by the Maine GIS Executive Council and were developed by members of the GIS Executive Council and GIS Technical Committee. One of the strategic plan’s goals is to deploy enterprise GIS to extend GIS’ capability to as many State programs as technology and resources will allow.
Much progress has been made towards achieving this goal. MEGIS has completed work with the Bureau of Information Services Network Services and the Database Divisions to establish and configure three major components of the required infrastructure that is now available for agency use.
ArcSDE 8.1, service pack 1 has been installed on the BIS Oracle production server. ArcSDE software is the GIS database component that supports enterprise GIS. The majority of the MEGIS vector data (e.g., hydrography, town boundaries, legislative boundaries, and roads) have been loaded into ArcSDE. In addition to the vector datasets, raster data such as Land Use/Land Cover, USGS DRGs and SPOT satellite imagery are now available. The final E911 road data with road names and address ranges is being added as well.
ArcSDE will be the final repository for statewide GIS data and will contain the most up-to-date geographic information available. The GIS Executive Council provides funding for the ongoing maintenance and enhancement of these data through agency service level agreements. The technology enables the integration of GIS functions into Oracle applications and the deployment of internet mapping applications (ArcIMS).
MEGIS GIS software and geographic data in SDE can also be accessed directly for mapping and analysis using thin client technology (Citrix). A dedicated Citrix server has been put into production and several agencies currently have Citrix login accounts. They are using Citrix to remotely access ArcInfo 8.1 and ArcView 3.2a. ArcView3.2a are set up to access the MEGIS Arc/Info libraries and ArcInfo 8.1 is set up to provide access to the BIS ArcSDE. BIS will add additional Citrix servers as needed to ensure that system performance is maintained.
Work to install ArcIMS 3 and ServletExec 4 on a Windows 2000 server inside the State’s firewall is now complete. ArcIMS provides the ability for non-GIS users to access GIS databases through an Internet browser to create maps and perform some spatial analysis. The ArcIMS spatial server will be accessing data directly from the ArcSDE database through a gigabyte network connection for public consumption or directly to agencies for Intranet applications. This infrastructure is scalable as well.
While rates for these services have not been set, MEGIS will be working with the GIS Executive Council to develop a rate mechanism that takes advantage of the collaborative nature of the Council service level agreements. We hope that interim rates will be established at the beginning of the next calendar year. The Council’s hope is that this new enterprise GIS technology will make "GIS more accessible and easier to use" and allow the Council to effectively manage the overall costs of statewide GIS. This infrastructure provides the ability to immediately get updated information in the ArcSDE database to the public through ArcIMS and to state agencies through Citrix.
Please contact David Kirouac (david.kirouac@state.me.us or call 624-9404), Manager of the MEGIS Data Center, to discuss using these new resources.
