GIS day was generally considered to have been a success. Most of the students were freshmen from Lebanon High School. The GPS exercise went well. The geography bee was a hit (at least with some of the teachers). Some thought that it would be better if older students came, and Kelly even suggested getting really old students from some of the senior centers. There was a discussion as to how to go about advertising for this event next year. Suggestions included getting a spring flyer out and following up in the fall with another reminder. Linda suggested taking flyers directly to school principles, telling them about the event, and asking them to share the information with teachers. Some of the problems: 1) group flow - there was a clumping of students at some demonstrations while others were empty, 2) having to vacate the demonstration room so soon caused problems, 3) a lack of seating upstairs, 4) students wandering the halls unaccompanied, 5) we need to come up with a better way of scoring the geography bee, 6) burnout for people having to do the same presentation over many times, 7) more participation from the general OSU community would have been better. Some general suggestions: 1) perhaps some pre-GIS-day in-school activities would have helped, 2) additional helpers for the upstairs sessions, 3) have on hand the capacity to zoom in and view specific address locations. No money will be available next year for t-shirts, treats, etc. If we want these things we will have to find a sponsor.
Keith Olsen did some testing on data storage. He looked into 4 options: 1) access data stored on your UNIX box through trillium, 2) make a samba connection directly to your UNIX box, 3) put data on a network attached storage box, or 4) access data on acer. He found it was significantly faster to connect directly to your UNIX box than to go through trillium, especially when making Arc copies. Access was faster to the network attached storage box and even faster through acer, but because of heavy network traffic the speed of access was more variable. Keith found that though the speed of access was generally slower when connecting directly to his UNIX box, because it was less variable the UNIX option was still a viable one. Keith wasn't sure if others would experience the same results as he did with his UNIX box, but Terralyn suspects that all will work the same.
Theresa is working to get metadata services to work on Arc IMS. She's almost there, but not quite yet. She is working on authentication problems while trying to publish to the metadata server
Lisa Ganio gave a report on database charges. She passed out 2 handouts to go with her report. These were printouts of the web pages: fee book and web and database services . Database and web hosting incurs a fee in cases where the databases or web sites use resources beyond those provided as part of the basic services. The use of Arc IMS web sites and SQL-servers are both examples of activities that use resources beyond the basic services. In both cases there will be a one-time setup fee and annual charges. These are outlined in the handouts and on the websites. In addition, there can be an hourly consulting fee depending on what you want to do. Mark pointed out that the fee structure was intended to make sure that QSG could recoup the costs that it incurs in order to provide the services. Sean pointed out that it was a way to distribute the cost of hardware expenses such as the database server, which will eventually need to be replaced.
In the discussion that followed it became clear that the current fee structure causes problems in the case of GIS databases. The question came up as to what would be considered another database for GIS. There is one machine (Rocky) that functions as the SQL sever, but within it multiple instances of SQL servers can be created. Theresa has learned that for every instance of SQL server there can be only one instance of SDE. Multiple databases can be within one instance of SDE, but the structure is flat and all databases are visible to all users. The question then is what kind of structure do we need to set up for the GIS community? How many instances of SDE will we need to make? What data should be clumped within one SDE and what data will need to have a separate instance of SDE? What kind of fee structure can QSG set up to reflect the database problems that are unique to GIS?
Mark noted that QSG didn't want the GIS community to be structuring data in a manner that was otherwise illogical in order to minimize costs under a particular fee structure. Theresa is unsure of how many instances of SDE the server can effectively operate. You don't need a database to run Arc IMS, but if you have more than a few sites then there is a serious degradation of performance without one. A lot of groups will want to make Arc IMS sites, and so we will need to go with a database. The option of setting up your own SQL database on your own machine was discussed, but Mark noted that 1) SQL servers get hacked and 2) it would be cheaper to do this collectively than to do it yourself. Because there are so many unanswered questions, a meeting will need to take place that focuses strictly on these data issues.
Sharon attended a meeting of the Interorganizational Resource Information Coordination Council (IRICC). The IRICC is a subcommittee to the Intergovernmental Advisory Committee to develop a seamless, current, and accessible information network to support ecosystem management. The meeting was intended to come up with roads data for Oregon and Washington. There is a need for this data now, and what now is available is kludged together. Sharon's assessment was that all they intend to do is kludge on yet more layers. They will spend $240,000 to get it all together.
Sharon also attended a meeting to assemble a geology map of the state at a finer scale than 1:500,000. Now they have data at 1:24,000 and 1:250,000 for different places and will be putting these together.
Sharon is involved with a statewide effort for mapping riparian areas. There is a statewide effort to acquire Landsat imagery for the whole state.
Marine conservation biology data is available on CD.
A website called Oregon DEQ Location Finder is available which provides state DOQ's for 1994. This would be useful for people trying to register images. They could get lat/longs from specific points.
Folks at the help desk suggest that we send help requests through the help desk even if we have a specific person we want to talk to. We can suggest that they route the question to a specific person. This will allow them to track questions better.
Mark is working on changing some of the drive mappings on the PC side. What he has will be somewhat similar to a UNIX automounter. One browsable directory service will get to a lot of different locations. Mark would like feedback on what spaces we want available.
The Department of Forestry is now updating current ownership data. The current dataset is from the 1980's or early 90's. This new dataset will not have parcel level information. It will be available on the clearinghouse once it is done.
Everyone enjoyed Pizza after the meeting as a thank-you for all the great help on GIS Day 20002