Environmental Project GIS Application

The current and related environmental problems are in managing the copious amounts of data received from contractors engaged in sample well data gathering, at various sites.

The shear work load in organizing and deciphering data in a printed form leads to communication problems and additional expenditures that this proposal strives to curtail. A brief list of stated problems is as follows:

• Difficulty communicating with, and presenting to, a non-technical audience
• Challenges in optimizing the drilling sampling plans
• Limiting factors of using 2D tools on 3D data and problems
• Difficulty with large amounts of sparse data
• Need to analyze, comprehend, and defend large volumes of printed data
• Working with dissimilar data types
• Interfacing to existing systems
• Quality control of previously collected data
• Need to evaluate different scenarios

The additional problems of communicating with regulators, the public, judiciary officials, base commanders, and possible shared responsible parties are addressed within this proposal. Time and a lack of personnel elevate these problems to where environmental project managers are monitoring the process of others a majority of the time instead of actively pursuing changes and alternates to the way others are gathering the data. The task at hand is clearly: The ability to view data gathered by the field and make effective cost saving decisions that better solve these problems. As this proposal is implemented a clear and concise measurement of effective and cost saving decisions that will be the ability to get control of the above processes, save time, and make better decisions.

Thousands of documents were scanned in Adobe PDF format and stored in an Oracle database. In addition to maintaining the original document's layout and signature blocks, an invisible text layer and metadata is saved with the document. This layer is used with Oracle's Context Cartridge to allow 'smart' search capabilities in regards to document retrieval. These search capabilities include search by keyword, best match, date range, topic, type, title, and also geospatial searching through a map interface.