ASLIB Minutes - May 12, 2000

May 12, 2000

Attendees

Mr. Stephen Hill for Bill Bush, Arkansas Geological Commission
Ms. Susan Cromwell, Department of Information Systems
Mr. Cecil Davis, Department of Arkansas Heritage
Mr. Randy Jones, First Electric Cooperative Corporation
Mr. Fred Limp, CAST
Ms. Shirley Sandlin, Benton County Assessor
Mr. Jubal Smith, Entergy Corporation, Inc.
Ms. Phyllis Smith, UALR
Ms. Suzanne Wiley, UAM

Not Attending

Mr. Duane Reel, City of Jacksonville
Mr. Phil Schoettlin, Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce
Mr. Jim Wells, Wellsco Graphics Solutions

Special Representatives
Clarence Durand, Director of Engineering, DIS
Doug Elkins, Deputy Directory, DIS
Karen Howard, Department of Health
Mr. Shelby Johnson, State Land Information Coordinator

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The meeting was called to order at 9:00 a.m. at the University of Arkansas Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies in Fayetteville. Minutes from the last meeting of the April 19, 2000, meeting were unanimously approved.

Report from the State Land Information Coordinator

Project Main

Shelby Johnson explained that eight to ten schools have completed their areas and other schools are wrapping their areas up. The data will be sent to CAST where it will be quality checked and assembled. He commented that during the Governor's presentation to the Information Technology Task Force and the Joint Committee, a slide on Project Main was included.

GIS Survey

Shelby said that the mass mailout was done and that his office is receiving many phone calls. He explained that his on-line survey has been a challenge because it was built with JAVA II, requiring downloading of the JAVA II plug-in, which has been giving some people problems. However, the project is progressing and responses are coming in.

Presentation

Shelby said that he had a spot on the agenda for the Joint Committee for Advanced Communications and Information Technology and the Information Technology Task Force. He explained that the Governor and Don Melton, Director of the Department of Information Systems, took up a considerable amount of time, which left Fred Limp and Shelby with about ten minutes each and lead some discussion about GIS issues. Shelby said that he and Fred gave an update on the progress of the Board and DIS over the past several months. He said that Susan Cromwell was on the agenda briefly and the meeting was wrapped up. Mark Hudson, who supports the Committee, said he would like to get the Board on the agenda again, possibly at the next meeting, and would like to arrange internet access so some demonstrations could be done involving GIS clearinghouses in other states.

Susan Cromwell was invited to comment on the Governor's presentation. She explained that the Governor wants to focus on citizen access, which is very much in keeping with having a GIS clearinghouse. She said he talked about the basic infrastructure that has to be supported in order to deliver internet access to government services. Susan commented that it linked in with how Don Melton followed up with the ICN. She pointed out that Barbara Pardue, Director of Economic Development, and Don Melton reached an agreement that state people would be used to continue the ICN program. The pilot communities will conclude with the Nortel services and six more will be handled with the leadership of Economic Development people who are already doing those type of projects. The ICN project will become an extension of ADED's ACE certification program. Susan explained that this will all impact how the Governor figures out the locations with input from Clarence Durand and work on the state backbone, and from Shelby's data on MAIN, which will identify where the resources need to go to push the government services out to the communities.

Suzanne Wiley raised the question of how this would impact the Land Information Board, and Susan explained that she has told Nortel that the Board would like to have another facilitated session.

Old Business

Color Infrared Photography Project

Shelby Johnson explained that the flying is on hold and that the processing is scheduled to begin. He said that the vendor needs to have the existing DOQs and DEMs in order to start processing. He has spoken briefly with Pam Smith at NRCS, who has a warehouse of all the DOQs in the state and the challenge is how to get all that data to the vendor.

Shelby added that another concern that has come up is that the USGS is concerned about the leaf-on situation more than was thought. He explained that even though the state is the contractor, the USGS has never had a state before with a hybrid data set of some photography with leaf on and some with leaf off. The USGS has requested a coordination letter to the NAPP steering committee that would highlight the areas where there may be photography with some leaf on. He stated that he believed this is an issue that can be mitigated and that the reason it is important is that if the USGS will not accept that film, then those flightlines will be rejected and they would have to be reflown next time.

Shelby went on to say that the USGS wishes for the state to resume flight on January 15 of 2001, and he has spoken with the contractor at great length and they believe flight can be resumed in November of 2000. The object is the sun angle be roughly the same. He explained that resuming the flights in November would give a longer time period in the event that there are weather complications.

Shelby said that the flights that were funded by the Corps of Engineers had all been completed and that initial processing had begun on the film.

Department of Highway and Transportation

Suzanne Wiley reminded the members of a draft of a letter from the last meeting that was to be sent to Dan Flowers, Director of the Highway and Transportation Department, requesting the county road data be made available to be included in the current SWAG development. She said the letter has been sent to Mr. Flowers but she wasn't aware if there had been any response as yet.

Shelby explained that the benefit to the Highway and Transportation Department would be that all the county data would be available on-line to all contractors that the Department works with, which would decrease the work load in their offices.

Shelby added that Don Melton has offered to help the Board with the project, if his assistance is needed.

Surveying Filing System

Randy Jones said that at the Surveyor's meeting, they came to an agreement regarding a pilot project and gather some numbers as to what it would cost for equipment. He explained that the theory is that the Board would have some meetings with the ASPS, continue on to get some numbers, and prepare legislation for funding around some pilot communities. He said that they have proposed five pilot communities. There was concern that there would be a revenue loss to the counties, and they talked about a statewide repository with fees which would be reimbursed back to the counties, with some fees back to DIS for managing the server.

Susan Cromwell emphasized that one of the more important aspects of this project is the development of a digital signature system. Randy said that this was very important to the surveyors, too.

Strategic Planning

Suzanne Wiley said that she would like to have the Board spend a whole day to focus on planning and pulling together ideas to complete the strategic plan.

Advisory Committee

Randy Jones said that the GIS Users Forum might be the way to start drawing together an advisory committee and subcommittees of different interests to assist the Board in developing GIS policies for the state. He emphasized that the main thing is to get started and that when the GIS Audit is completed, it might be possible to use that mailing list to send out a letter to that group.

Suzanne Wiley said that the GIS users are a group that the Board needs feedback from and also needs to give feedback to regarding the projects the LIB is working on in order to engender their support for legislative efforts. She pointed out that it is also important to publicize who the Board is and what work the Board is doing for the state.

Fred Limp explained that in his opinion a large advisory group is effective in an educational setting but not effective in informational setting. He suggested that the Board set up a small advisory committee if the purpose is to get advice and large if the Board wants to educate them on what's going on to get them to come on board. Suzanne felt that it is important to both get direction and also for the near future to get support for legislative efforts. She then suggested that a letter be drafted to invite potential members to meet sometime. Susan Cromwell suggested that at an intermediate level, the objective could be to contact people who might have the strongest lobbying efforts to contribute. Fred Limp commented that it would be very effective to invite key people who are representatives of larger groups, such as the county judges. Shelby Johnson said that it was his observation that the private sector and counties are strong lobbying groups.

It was decided that the Board will start with forming a small group of key individuals and then organize a larger group later on with the assistance of the key advisory committee.

Legislation

Suzanne Wiley passed out a list of legislative issues for the members to review and asked them for any comments they might have. Suzanne then brought up the issue of the concurrent terms of the LIB members and asked whether that is something that needs to be approached for the next legislative session. Susan Cromwell felt that in the initial legislation that formed the board, the term limits for the members were made concurrent just by oversight. Susan suggested that the Board decide what the appointments should be and how they should roll over by looking at some other examples. Suzanne Wiley suggested that the current terms could perhaps end on a two-year staggered basis.

It was agreed that legislative issues would be developed further when the Board meets with the Nortel representative and a date will be set for that.

Future Meetings

Suzanne Wiley suggested that it would be good to try to get Nortel to meet with the Board in June in order to work on the legislative package. The next meeting dates were set tentatively for June 21, July 19, and August 16 in Monticello. She suggested that both the June and July meetings should be all day and involve strategic planning and legislative issues.

Suzanne also pointed out that it was time to re-elect officers for the coming year. Shirley Sandlin made a motion that all officers remain the same for the coming year. Susan Cromwell seconded the motion. The vote was unanimous to carry all elected positions through the next year.

The business meeting was then adjourned.

CAST Presentation

LIB members were then hosted by CAST staff. CAST gave a presentation of the prototype of SWAG to get a solid view of the nature of the institutional and budgetary requirements that would be needed to make the SWAG Research Project into a 7/24 mission critical application (now called GeoStor) for the state. Special guests were Doug Elkins, Deputy Director of DIS, and Clarence Durand, Director of Engineering, as well as Tom Clemmons of Oracle.

Documents describing the following issues were the subject of the meeting after the presentation:

Development Issues
Hardware Configuration
Estimated Space Requirements
Software Configuration
SWAG Data Loading Schedule from May of this year through November

After a brief discussion regarding Oracle licensing, hardware requirements, personnel for support, etc. it was determined that further study is necessary to more completely identify the operational issues, but that it is likely the costs projected were considerably under that which will likely be necessary to create an operational environment.