Author
Crile Doescher

Introduction
   Recently, Mike and I got together to try and flesh out some of the possibilities for a NZERN GIS Database that would allow people access to information for individual restoration project over the web. The database would be there as a resource for those involved in the project as well as anyone interested in getting more information on a particular project. Eagle Technology has offered to make a copy of ArcView 8.0 available to NZERN which includes ArcIMS. Ultimately, IMS is probably the venue we’ll want to use to make these data available over the Web, but given that it will be a year before that’s available, Mike and I thought we might need to look at things as a two-stage process. What follows here are some of the ideas we came up with – they are by no means definitive but are here more or less to give us somewhere to start. As we get a bit more organised some of these ideas might be discarded and replaced by something better.

Stage 1 - PreIMS
    Initially, we thought it might be good to set up one project as a test case to more or less show people what the possibilities for their project might be. One possibility for such a test case could be Quail Island in Lyttelton Harbour. There is already a fairly extensive database for the island (as shapefiles, grids, GPS points, and JPEG aerial photos – I’ll provide a list below of what data are available). For stage one, perhaps we could concentrate on the test case as a way of allowing people (mainly those involved with restoration projects) to see what the possibilities are for their particular project.
    Given that we probably won’t have access to ArcIMS for another year, the trick in this early stage will be to find a way to display data in a GIS-like manner, perhaps using clickable imagemaps. On that note, does anyone know how to make images at least partially transparent? I’m thinking of perhaps how we could plop an image of, say, contours over a topo map image (for example) such that the map beneath is still visible. Mike thought there might be a way to do this with GIFs. Any other ideas?
    Based on the test case we could then begin to get some feedback from projects as to what sort of data they might like to have available for their site. I would imagine that we could provide common data layers (contours, project boundaries, rivers, roads, vegetation, topo map images, ?) and then work with each project individually to cater for their needs. This is going to involve a fair bit of contact with projects that are interested in taking part in this. In this period before ArcIMS arrives we could be gathering the shapefiles, images, whatever, so that everything is ready to go by the time it does arrive.

Stage 2 – IMS arrives
    When IMS is here, stage 2 will mean continuing on with pulling data together and continuing to work with individual projects to get the data the way they want it. There will of course be ongoing maintenance and updating but by this point, much of the hard work would be done (?). I haven’t worked with IMS myself (though we will be getting a copy at Lincoln by October) so we’ll need a guru of sorts to get things rolling there.

Structure
    We had a few thoughts on how things might be structured. Again, these are just some initial ideas and are subject to discussion. We pictured things in levels where the levels are tied to scale really. The hardest part of doing something like this is trying to anticipate how users will want to use it. With the most general user (perhaps someone who wants to know something about a lot of projects or is trying to become familiar with what projects are available in a particular area, they might start out at a level on the scale of the country, then move to a region, a district, then a particular project. We pictured clickable maps that let people zoom in on areas (the Environment Canterbury website ( www.ecan.govt.nz ) is an example of this a few more are listed below). I would also assume that we’d have links from individual project pages to the GIS maps as a way in. We thought that there might be many ways by which people would want to get at a particular project, so maybe we should start with a menu of ways in (TLAs, ecological districts, etc.) which then goes to a map:
   

Level 1 – User chooses a way to view the country from a menu, e.g:
    Regions, or
    DOC Conservancies, or
    TLAs, or
    Ecological districts, or
    Tribal boundaries, or
    Ecological regions

Level 2 – NZ map showing boundaries of above choice – user clicks on an area of the map from level 1 (with IMS this would probably just mean zooming in on the level 2 map)

Level 3 - Base map showing restoration project locations from Level 2 map. User zooms in on or clicks an area of interest.

Level 4 - Individual project data

• Topo Map image
• Contours
• Soil types (NZLRI)
• Land cover (LCDB)
• Cadastral boundaries (DCDB?)
• Aerial photos (LINZ) – crop to specific areas
• Status (reserve, private land, etc.)
• Catchment boundaries
• Roads
• Rivers
• Buildings, urban areas, utilities
• Photos

Keywords
Pipi  GIS 

Updated 20/11/2008 4.10AM by PIPI4