February 14, 2001

Attendees

Mr. Chris Boudreaux, Conway Corporation
Mr. 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. Phil Schoettlin, Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce
Mr. Jubal Smith, Entergy Corporation, Inc.
Ms. Phyllis Smith, UALR
Ms. Suzanne Wiley, U of A Cooperative Extension Services

Not Attending

Mr. Jim Wells, Wellsco Graphics Solutions

Special Representatives

Mr. Shelby Johnson, State Land Information Coordinator
Mr. Learon Dalby, GIS Specialist
Mr. Mike Garner, Westark College

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The meeting was called to order and the minutes of December 15, 2000, and of January 31, 2001, were approved.

Report of the State Land Information Coordinator

Shelby Johnson commented on the updated web pages and the new domain name of www.gis.state.ar.us, which will serve as a gateway to GIS information for the state. He also explained that Learon Dalby has created a web page that will allow members of the General Assembly to request custom maps based on their specific interests. He hopes this will be an educational tool to help legislators understand some of the practical uses of GIS.

NAPP

Shelby next explained that the flights are continuing as the weather allows. The contractor reports that of the original 50% of the state that remained to be covered, 50% of that has been completed, leaving about one-quarter of the state left to fly. All of the QA/QC inspection has been returned from last year's flight and now the contractor knows which areas will require reflights and those will be done this year.

ADOP

Shelby explained that an additional requirement has been added to the project as a deliverable is Mr. Sid compressed data. He said it was hard to decide on what compression ratio to utilize, so he thought the best thing to do would be to let the Board make the decision. He showed examples of file size versus quality. He said the contractor recommends 20:1 compression, which delivers excellent compression, but he thought the quality loss might not meet all needs. He asked the contractor to run tests at 15:1 and 10:1 and 5:1. Shelby explained that the whole state at no compression is between 450GB to 500GB. He showed examples of files at different compression ratios and asked the Board members for their feedback.

After a lengthy discussion of the best way to provide the data to users, the members recommended going for the lowest compression to get the best quality possible at 5:1 or 10:1, and possibly investigate whether or not Mr. Sid can recompress and what other states are using. It was also recommended that the full uncompressed files be available for users to acquire by coming on site and making CDs from the data. Shelby will check with the vendor about receiving three separate data sets of 5:1, 20:1 and then the USGS set.

Suzanne Wiley asked if Shelby knew how much of the NAPP was rejected in the QA/QC and Shelby estimated around 60 frames, which was very good.

Corps of Engineers River Project

Shelby announced that the entire Arkansas River photography project has been entirely reflown because the film from last year was rejected. The DEM and vector contours are in production, and the digital orthos based on the new flight are also in production. He hopes to have them delivered later in the spring.

GeoStor

Fred Limp said that since the initiation of the system, there have been 2,014 data downloads. He explained that the downloads are organized by coordinate system, whether or not they were chopped out by polygon or by a bounding box, the formats that people are requesting, and the IP addresses of requestors. He pointed out that the most downloads from a single location have been made from addresses at the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

Parcel Project

Shelby Johnson reminded the Board that all his information in his report regarding the proposed parcel project are educated guesses. He attempted to do estimates on the number of counties that have some mapping done and then what it would take to complete digitized parcel mapping for the state in terms of time and money. It would entail going back to deed research from the grantor/grantee books, finding the book and page, copying the deed or getting the full legal record, and then digitizing that information. He explained that he estimated it would take one hour per deed and invited the Board to discuss this and revise it if necessary. Shelby said that the larger parcels would be easier to map, using digital cues from photography and section maps, which would probably move faster. He estimated 10 per hour for urban parcels, mainly because there are already bigger and better maps. For rurban areas, he estimated 5 per hour.

Shelby went on to explain that they figured a 50-week work year, which yields 200 weeks in a four-year cycle or 100 weeks in a two-year cycle. He assigned a fairly high wage per hour, which could be lowered, and then a hardware and software cost, travel costs, and estimates for urban aerial photography. He explained that the overhead costs were very rough and said that he just did not have time to put into research to come up with a reasonable overhead calculation. A rough estimate to complete digitized parcel mapping for Arkansas would be $35-40 million.

Shelby asked the Board to review his estimates and provide feedback in order to refine the project numbers. Susan Cromwell suggested that the Board also needs to address the possibility of a pilot project and how to get funding to do so.

Old Business

The status of SLIB legislative efforts were discussed. Senate bills 495 and 580 have been submitted by Senator Gullett and are scheduled to come before the Senate Technology and Legislative Affairs Committee very soon. HB 1534 and 1365 were briefly discussed.

Randy reported that plans were confirmed for the dinner with the Women's Caucus to be hosted by the SLIB and Carmie Henry, VP for Governmental Affairs, Arkansas Electric Cooperatives on February 26th. Shelby and Learon will give a presentation on SLIB activities. Board members were encouraged to attend. Seven members responded that they would be there.

New Business

New business was tabled until the next meeting.

Future Meetings

The next meeting was set for February 26. A tentative meeting was also set for March 21 and April 4.
The meeting was adjourned and the Board was given a presentation by the Arkansas One-Call Association Director, Dale Enoch.