June 18, 2002

Board Members Attending

Mr. Chris Boudreaux, Conway Corporation
Mr. Bill Bush, Arkansas Geological Commission
Mr. Jackson Cothren, Attending for Jim Wells, Wellsco, Inc
Ms. Susan Cromwell, Fayetteville Public School District
Mr. Randy Jones, First Electric Cooperative Corporation
Dr. Fred Limp, CAST
Mr. Mike McGibbony, Department of Information Systems
Ms. Shirley Sandlin, Benton County Assessor
Ms. Phyllis Smith, U of A at Little Rock
Ms. Suzanne Wiley, U of A Cooperative Extension Service

Board Members Not Present

Mr. Earl Smith, Ark Soil & Water Conservation Commission
Mr. Jubal Smith, Entergy

Attending By Video Conference

None

LIB Advisory Panel

None Present

Arkansas Geographic Information Office

Mr. Shelby Johnson, State Geographic Information Coordinator
Mr. Learon Dalby, GIS Program Manager
Ms. Leann Winston, GIS Intern

Guests

Debbie Asbury and John Zimpel, Assessment Coordination Division
Mike Mitchell, GIS Forum
Mike Nesmith, Computer Support Group
Bobby Wallace, Computer Support Group
Tracy Moy, Arkansas Game & Fish
Mike Garner, UA, Ft. Smith

 

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The meeting was called to order. The minutes of the last meeting of May 13, 2002 were approved and accepted unanimously.

 

Report from State Geographic Information Office

IT Governance Structure

Shelby Johnson reported that Mr. Randall Bradford, Executive CIO and Mr. Mike Miller, Chief Security Officer have been dismissed from their appointments. During the interim the Office of Information Technology, Information Technology Security,the Architecture Group and the Geographic Information Office will operate business as usual under the direction of Mr. Doug Elkins, Director, Department of Information Systems.

MOU with USGS and National Map

Shelby Johnson explained that we now have a copy of the Memorandum of Understanding between USGS and the Land Information Board. The objective is to establish a framework for technology transfer and testing concepts of the National Map. Kari Kraun, current Chief of the Mid Continent Mapping Center and Mark Coppersmith, our State Liaison, will be here in Little Rock on July 2, 2002 to tour the Geographic Information Office and the USGS Water Resources Division, Little Rock Office. The purpose will be to explore the placement of a person on detail from National Mapping Division to Arkansas as a part of our National Map Pilot activities and National Map Research activities. USGS is calling this activity a Mapping Partnership Office. Shelby is hopeful and has been told Arkansas ranks high in their selection criteria for placement and they are looking at placing someone in 2003 or 2004. Depending on budget and resources, according to Shelby’s assessment, USGS will probably place about seven people in Mapping Partnerships. These seven placements will be distributed between sixteen or seventeen states. Since these are not new positions, they will have to find people within the existing framework of the organization that are willing to be placed in the different areas.

Arkansas AmericaView Consortium

Shelby reported a purchase order has been executed with the USGS Data Center that will enable the move forward with scene acquisition. No other coordination has taken place with the consortium membership. Later in the fall or winter another scene acquisition will be done based on consortium interest.

Arkansas Digital Ortho Program

Learon Dalby reported that data continues to trickle in. USGS files are received weekly and are being passed on to USGS after copies are made. There are still sixty - seven DOQQ.s remaining to be created. The flying has been completed but they are working on processing them through. Since the last board meeting sixty potential rejections have been sent for various items. They are working on reprocessing those and we will be getting some updated DOQQ’s to replace them. The state portion should be wrapped up by the end of July with the exception of those that are being reprocessed.

Learon reported that ADOP data is online in GeoStor.

I-Team Plan

Learon reported he is ready to move forward with the I Team Plan. Susan commented that the board had approved everything in the last meeting and work will continue on the plan. It will remain on the table and subcommittees will continue to work on the plan.

Regional/National Map Pilot

Shelby reported a conference call was held on May 29, 2002 between the National Mapping Division, CAST, and the Forest Resource Institute. The purpose of the call was to discuss some national map pilot project follow up activity from the MOU. The goal was to explore national map issues along state borders using open GIS standards. Action items resulting from the discussion were, CAST will provide USGS a password access which will allow them direct connect and CAST will provide USGS with a White Paper on the GeoStore technical architecture. Both things have been completed. USGS will provide a staffer to review the GeoStor architecture from remote connection.

Assessors Conference

Learon attended the Assessors conference in Fort Smith. He reported there were a lot of questions and interest in GIS. Learon asked the board for their formal resolutions or thoughts on how to respond to their questions, particularly related to policies and standards for uploading and accessing data in GeoStor (see below).

GeoStor and Related Projects

Dr. Fred Limp reported he has emailed a status report to members of the board. Downloads are now up to 29,000. The pace of the downloads continues to increase. An Important addition recently has been the black and white DOQQ’s, have jumped to the number one download of all the data sets and the 1:24,000 Digital Raster Graphics are the number two most downloaded data sets. We are getting more requests than we are able to put out of the system. In order to make it easier and quicker to get the color infra red they are put on the system as a standard FTP. In ten days six hundred files have been downloaded and twenty four hundred initiated.

Fred reported there will be a 2.0 release toward the end of the month. He announced there will be an initial registration page requesting an email address and other minor information. This will ensure information being sent to the correct address. Security levels have been built in to ensure homeland security issues can be maintained. Preferences will also be created so formats and search areas can be defined. In order to resolve the problem of processing the requests, the queing structure will be rebuilt so the ques will be spread across multiple machines.

A system will be designed so the clip, cut and re-project can be performed on small Lennox boxes to increase the performance on the raster distribution.

Fred reported we have been funded directly from the Open GIS Consortium to add a number of new capacities into GeoStor. As OGC compliant capacities are made available anywhere GeoStor will be one of the first locations in the world that has that kind of capacity. At this point it appears that GeoStor will be the largest single comprehensive data stor that is available with OGC service plugged into it. OGC develops use cases which are test pilots. There is a very good chance that GeoStor will be the use case demonstration. This means all of the development work done in OGC for the Geo Spatial One Stop will be tested against GeoStor. This is an international activity not just a national activity.

Shelby reported the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association, a national association that focuses on GIS and related technologies in city and local governments, has an award process called Exemplary Systems In Government. They have two awards, the Project Specific Award and the Enterprise Level Award. GeoStor has been nominated for the Enterprise Level Award. The announcement will be in the next month and the award presentation should take place at the conference in August or September.

Funding Models for GeoStor

Mike McGibbony reported that e government should be driven by citizens, state agencies,and vendor partners. Collaboration with all state agencies, citizens, and vendor partners will take place in a meeting planned for the end of July. This meeting will provide a solution/scope development and discovery workshop. He emphasized this meeting will take place with no policy in place. Prior to Randall Bradford’s departure there was a one page document outlining different policies. He had created, with OIT’s help, an IT Strategic Plan. GeoStor was added as one of those policy points. However, with the recent changes in leadership and the discussion of e government it could be that the operations and feature sets of GeoStor as an operational component and could possibly give value to e government. Mike presented the question to Nancy Turner, DIS, concerning the appropriation for GIS. He asked if it could be put into DIS as a component of e government. There is a question at this point what influence the board has and who the board needs to talk with to determine funding.

Mike encouraged the group to go to the DIS website and study the rate model. DIS is one of eleven agencies that is required to do performance based budgeting. He explained what it would look like to have GIS incorporated into the model. He suggested the Strategic Planning Group and the Funding and Economic Group have a meeting with Doug Elkins.

Board Decisions and Old Business

Homeland Security

Shelby reported that the Critical Infrastructure Protection Initiative is underway. This initiative takes advantage of GIS techniques and methods and then deals with critical infrastructure data sets. They participated in an on line survey from OGC and the Spatial Information Technology Association and submitted Arkansas as being interested in testing models, testing cases, testing technique, and testing methods. Concurrent with that, through FGDC, there is a homeland security working group. The FGDC has developed a draft list of four hundred odd features that they have determined are critical infrastructure. From that the National States Geographic Information Council has been asked to respond on behalf of all the states. Shelby has submitted Arkansas’ response. Shelby’s assessment is that Arkansas has about two percent to five percent of what they are going to want from this activity. It is basically data that has been created through other projects that have produced certain elements of this list. Of that two to five percent we would have to go back and verify and update data.

Somewhere around 10% of the data exists in the spatial format. It leaves about 85% of the data on the list as needing to be developed in Arkansas. It is a concern that we may receive an uncoordinated mandate or worse an unfunded mandate. Somewhere between 98 and 100% of the elements that are listed in that draft list have an address. A concern was sent back inquiring why so much time should be spent nationwide, focusing on the four hundred critical infrastructure elements and trying to map them when if we had a nationwide, current, accurate, reliable and maintained centerline data base, we could geo code data as they are changed from time to time to generate a reliable geo coded point for data. This would serve far more than homeland security. Our response to FGDC is, other than focusing on other things, we should build an enabling data set such as centerlines that will provide us true answers.

FGDC has launched the RAND Study. The study was commissioned by USGS and NIMA and is being conducted by the RAND Cooperation. It is to study data access related to homeland security. Shelby will be participating in a conference call on June 25, 2002 to provide our input and response.

The Arkansas Department of Emergency Management requested the agencies boards and commissions in the state provide to them a response on how their entity could assist them in homeland security efforts in the state. The response is still in draft form. Shelby passed around the executive level recommendations to the board for endorsement. Susan Cromwell entertained a motion to authorize Shelby Johnson to proceed with the response to the Arkansas Homeland Security Plan to the Department of Emergency Management. Shirley Sandlin interjected it should be modified as recommended by Suzanne Wiley, with provisions that any adjustments be made prior to send off. Susan added they should be distributed to the board with a quick turn around. Phyllis Smith made the motion this be accepted Suzanne Wiley seconded. It was accepted unanimously.

Fred explained that EAST stands for Environmental and Spatial Technology and is an eight year old program. It is in one hundred and fifty four schools in Arkansas. It involves the equipping with private sector support of a very high quality computer lab with GIS, and a variety of other software plotters. The students get basic training in skill sets and participate in community projects. The students identify a project in the community that involves GIS or design work and then solve that community problem as a team. It has been very successful.

Centerline

Learon Dalby.distributed the Arkansas Centerline File Standards document. Learon sought approval from the board on the Centerline File Standards. Learon explained that as local data is received it gets molded into the statewide centerline file standard. Shelby pointed out that there are number of Arkansas counties that have implemented 911 and done mapping. Out of those counties that have developed 911 systems and built a centerline file to support the 911, most have a different way of implementing the underlying data structure. In their centerline research the team pulled together a query and the only set that currently exists that supports this kind of application is Tiger. Fifty eight percent of all road segments in that data base do not have a name populated in the name field. If there is a disaster of any kind the best and quickest way to locate where those things came from is through address matching and Geo coding. This depends on having a high quality centerline data set for our entire state. This standard would provide leadership that would move our state forward.

There was a first and seconded motion to adopt the centerline file standards through the rules process. It was accepted unanimously.

Draft Resolution for Uploading Data into GeoStor

Learon distributed a draft resolution that was sent to the GeoStor Policies subcommittee to start articulating some language on how spatial data will be accepted and uploaded into GeoStor. The AGIO office is looking for some kind of language that can be used as a formal response. Discussion followed concerning the draft. It was suggested the board develop the criteria to prioritize data. It was also suggested the criteria would need to coincide with what the CIO Office produces as enterprise policy for the state. Dr. Limp suggested that the ASDI Policy Subcommittee, with the assistance of the technical staff, be charged with developing an initial list of some possible ways to prioritize this data by the next board meeting.

GIS Domain for State Strategic Plan

Suzanne reported that the CIO Council has approved the inclusion of GIS as an additional domain in the State Strategic Plan. The text submitted by the SLIB has been adopted. However, the entire plan has not been approved by the CIO Council. Shelby commented that it is still very relevant. Suzanne said there may be more changes or additions but things will not happen until a new CIO is appointed.

Electronic Plat Filing Project

Shelby read a letter announcing that the Professional Surveyor’s Society will host a meeting to bring in all the stakeholders of the electronic plat filing project. It will be held at the UALR Donahey Center, Meeting Room A, Tuesday, June 25, 2002 at 10:00 a.m. Learon will represent the board at this meeting.

SDSFIE Efforts

Chris Boudreaux reported there will be a training day, Tuesday, June 25, 2002 to bring members up to speed on software. A representative from the CAD Center in Vicksburg has offered to come here for a one day training session.

Board Meeting Attendance

Susan reminded the board that members need to take their board appointments seriously. If a member misses three consecutive meetings it is reported and the Governor decides if that appointment needs to be reassigned.

New Business

Discussion of Board Appointments

Susan reminded the board that the state agency representative’s terms will expire. She asked those members to communicate to her if they will be available to serve again. The board will then recommend to the Governor’s Office that the state appointees term be renewed for four years

Potential Legislative Issues

Susan distributed literature concerning a proposed model law for how the survey community establishes licenses. She suggested the board read over the material and stay informed of on-going discussions.

GIS Certification

Mike Garner reported that the only people certification would impact and benefit are people who do not have strong academic backgrounds in GIS. He distributed a handout explaining the different definitions for an individual doing GIS licensing. He explained that a significant number of people in GIS have not had an academic background. Certification programs recognize academics as a requirement and we do not have people in the state that meet that requirement. The committee is monitoring the efforts of certification in the state.

Future Meeting Dates

Future meeting dates will be determined through e mail.

Meeting adjourned 2:30 p.m.