June 1, 2007 ~ More than 150 people spent a beautiful day at the URI Narragansett Bay Campus learning the latest about RIGIS ~ Rhode Island Geographic Information System ~ at the RIGIS Conference, sponsored by URI, The Coastal Institute, Applied Science Associates and CSREES (Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service of the USDA). Rhode Island has one of the most developed and substantial sets of georeferenced data in the United States, and Rhode Islanders are working to make RIGIS very user-friendly for the public.
What is GIS and what does it do for you and me? It is a combination of computer hardware, software, and databases of information that are connected to latitude and longitude, in short, "georeferenced" data. [Follow the links in the first sentence for more official explanations of GIS.] And so what do we do with this? Some of the presentations today hint at the range of possibilities:
- Sewer Systems - Integrating GIS with a computerized maintenance management system
- Water distribution mapping & scanning
- RIDEM uses GIS to inventory conservation lands
- RI Statewide Planning Program is revising a new land use/land cover set using GIS...
- Many natural resource applications, including mapping coastal areas, estuaries, and eelgrass habitats
- Visualizing assessors revaluation data
- Narragansett Bay Coyote Study
If you have seen Google Earth, you have seen GIS in action. Pretty amazing, isn't it?
Here are links to some interesting maps generated by GIS data for Rhode Island.
In production is an updated Rhode Island Digital Atlas, RI Geodata Gateway, and Rhode Island's Changing Landscape. The last website will show how Rhode Island land cover has changed from 1972 through 1999.
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