THE GOOGLE EARTH REVOLUTION - PUBLIC PARTICIPATION IN GIS BECOMES A REALITY

The Maine DEP has been using GIS in-house for 20 years now. With the growing popularity of web mapping applications, the department's GIS Unit started investigating tools that would be able to serve its scientific data to users outside the building walls. After a number of iterations with more expensive and labor intensive technologies it became clear that a simple visual presentation application was required. Google Earth met this requirement. It is now serving millions of records worth of spatial and environmental sampling data, including groundwater surface water, biologic and physical data, to environmental consultants, the regulated community, the research community and the general public. Recently, we discovered that a growing number of internal GIS users and managers are finding our Google Earth applications meet their daily GIS requirements as well.

Google Earth provides an easy-to-use, consistent, low-cost platform that has been widely accepted and praised by users. This session will demonstrate a number of the DEP projects. It will review the principles and technologies the DEP GIS Unit has used to implement Google Earth as its web mapping platform. Google “maine dep gis data” and see for yourself.