A major concern of agencies using GIS is data currency and attributes accuracy. Maintenance of data is one of the costliest issues in a GIS operation and generally only qualified GIS professionals have the skills required to maintain the myriad of datasets housed in the GIS enterprise. In addition, creating new datasets adds to the burden. With these constraints, it’s no wonder that spatial data is often out of date. It's just too big a job for small departments and resources for additional personnel are not available. What if there was a way to get some help from local data experts who are not GIS experts? For example, what if Road Commissioner staff could help you maintain the county centerline if they had a way to perform preliminary data maintenance? If this vision is practical for your organization, IGRE has developed a suite of customized scripts, which extends the capabilities of ArcIMS for those organizations using an ArcSDE geodatabase in their GIS architecture. These scripts allow authorized users of an ArcIMS service to interact with map layers designed for the editing of point, line and polygon features and their associated attribute tables. The ArcIMS map layers with the scripts are configured with the ArcSDE geodatabase constructed for the editing functions.

INTRODUCTION The increasing demand for accurate land information for planning and development by municipal agencies has spurred the conversion of paper cadastral records to digital GIS formats. This automation has made it easier for those in government who needed this data for decision making to access it quickly from their desktop computers. Over the last several years, commercial software packages have been developed to publish these data on the Web. Web publishing provides these data throughout the enterprise without having to maintain individual workstation software and data. Unfortunately, the cost of these systems is often prohibitive for most rural municipalities. THE OPEN SOURCE TOOL ALTERNATIVE During this same period, public research focused on developing “Open Source” tools for publishing data on the Web. IGRE application developers followed these developments and selected MapServer®, a map scripting computer code that excels at rendering spatial data (maps, images, and vector data) over the web. Through our research efforts, IGRE developed the Parcel Query Template (IPQT), a cost effective Web GIS application for publishing data to the Internet. An implementation of the IPQT for the Ogemaw County Equalization Department can be viewed at http://ogemawgis.com/parcelquery/website/.

As the United States focuses efforts on the goal of defending against future attacks under the banner of Homeland Security, the need for GIS in emergency management and response is clear. GIS provides the best method to efficiently and effectively support emergency management and response information needs whether its local 911 call location mapping or disaster management applications with the scope of September 11th. No other technology allows for the visualization of emergency or disaster situations as effectively as GIS. By placing a map of the accurate physical geography of a disaster event on a computer monitor, along with conditions or threats within that geography, GIS lets police, fire, medical and administrative personnel make decisions based on data they can see and judge for themselves. This visual information can be of critical relevance to emergency responders or a disaster manager. GIS is also a data consolidator. Decision makers, whether at the state capital or at the scene of a toxic chemical spill, are always faced with more information than they can deal with. GIS brings many information sources into clear focus, helping responders decide which things can wait, which can be delegated. These are the kinds of choices and compromises that are intrinsic to disaster management. GIS allows them to be seen with new clarity. With the right data and the right GIS tools, understanding of where help is needed becomes instantaneous. And in a disaster, instantaneous is the speed at which responders want to be moving. IGRE is working with the Ogemaw County Sheriff's Department and the Detroit Public School District to develop data and applications that allow responders to move fast. One critical data set all responders need is an accurate street centerline map. Whether it is used for locating incidents or used to route first responders to the disaster site quickly, the street centerline is a critical data layer in any 911 or emergency response system. IGRE has developed routing and centerline cleanup applications that create street centerlines that are validated with respect to street naming, street direction, address range gaps and overlaps and odd/even number assignment. These applications also validate the centerlines for use with vendor specific, 911 Computer Aided Dispatch systems, the local telephone company's Master Street Addressing Guide, and comply with National Emergency Number Association and US Postal Service data formats.

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IGRE is an applied GIS Research Institute. Our Mission is to support the public and private use of geospatial technology. To accomplish our Mission, we provide technology transfer and technical support in the areas of GIS consulting, application development, data conversion, remote sensing, distributed GIS and GIS-based modeling to research organizations, public agencies, non-profits and the private sector. IGRE has a dedicated group of EMU Professors, professional developers, staff, and graduate students committed to solving problems by applying spatial information technology to everyday business challenges. GIS is quickly becoming an integral component in the way governments plan, manage and maintain the public infrastructure and provide services and homeland security. When you need insights into utilizing GIS for your next project, call IGRE. GIS is all we do!

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Application development is a general term used to describe the process of researching, specifying and designing the appearance and functions of a computer program. IGRE develops spatial applications from scratch to our clients needs or customizes off-the-shelf commercial applications that integrate with multiple disparate database sources that each of our clients provide us access to. IGRE can design GIS applications for public safety, land records management, data maintenance, automated vehicle locating, economic development and natural resource management. We can also integrate applications with numerous hardware platforms such as handheld devices, notebooks, tablets, desktop machines and server environments using state-of-the-art developing tools. Customization, on the other hand, is a term used to describe the manipulation of already existing program functions. Programs are customized to generally reduce the complexity of completing a task from several operations to one or two, or to add additional functionality. IGRE has a group of professional developers who can create custom GIS applications or customize your software to your requirements.

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The process of converting data stored in one format to another format is termed data conversion. The conversion of source documents (i.e. paper, digital, image, etc.) to the desired digital format is often the most laborious task related to implementing a functional GIS system. IGRE uses state-of-the-art software and efficient workflow processes to reduce the cost of data development to a level that is affordable to everyone. Whether you need drawings scanned for your facilities GIS or digital map room, or require the digitizing of paper plats to build your GIS parcel framework, IGRE can provide the data development services you need.

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As complicated as it sounds, remote sensing is something we all do as a matter of daily life. In essence it is simply the process of sensing something without coming into contact with it. At this very moment you are engaged in remote sensing with your eyes, just by looking at this computer screen. You can distinguish certain colors, which are displayed and can read text symbols. The colors and the text are the information that you are sensing. Being able to distinguish colors and understand the text is the analysis of the information that you are sensing. In GIS, remote sensing generally refers to the use of aerial or spaceborne sensors. Although not quite the same as human eyes, the sensors on airplanes and earth-observing satellites serve a similar purpose. Unlike your eyes, which can only sense energy in the form of visible light, airborne or spaceborne sensors can sense many different kinds of energy such as infrared, thermal energy, visible light, etc. After the sensors pick up the energy they record it onto a medium and the gathered information gets analyzed and interpreted in much the same way as your brain interprets the information on this computer screen. Often, remotely sensed image data of the earth's surface is used to recognize natural and man-made features on the ground. The identification of visual elements of the imagery, (pixel signature) by a trained image analyst, can provide valuable information to identify specific features in the image. IGRE analysts use aerial and spaceborne sensed data in projects where it is often too costly or where the area to be studied is too large to collect on-the-ground data. Color infrared image data is often used to identify impervious features and natural features such as wetlands and land cover.

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The development of Geographic Information Systems is highly influenced by the evolution of information technology. Due to the popular use of the Internet and the dramatic progress of telecommunications technology, the paradigm of GIS is shifting. Traditional GIS systems provide capabilities to handle georeferenced data, including data input, storage, retrieval, management, manipulation, analysis, and output. However, with closed and centralized legacy architecture, current GIS systems cannot fully accommodate distributed, diverse network environments due to their lack of interoperability, modularity, and flexibility. With advances in computer networking technologies, a distributed geographic information services paradigm becomes a reachable goal, albeit one that requires fundamental changes in architectural design. IGRE is in the forefront of developing this emerging technology. Our VISIT and WebPolis projects funded by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Commerce, respectively, focused on research into the architectural designs need to implement distributed GIS.

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mdueweke@emich.edu