Athens County
                    Cooperative Land Administration
                    and Information Mapping System
 
May 31, 2001
 
Athens County Commissioners
15 South Court Street, 2nd Floor
Athens, Ohio 45701
                                  RE: Monthly GIS Progress Report
Commissioners:
 
Our ArcView training class was held at ILGARD on May 17th and 18th.
We had 14 people take the class.  Participants were very satisfied
with the class.
 
Ken is working on getting an Internet connection installed, so that he
may sign up for an ESRI "Virtual Campus" Introduction to ArcInfo using
ArcTools class.  This Internet correspondence class will be the basis
for beginning computerized plat map maintenance when our parcel data
conversion process concludes next year.
 
We will not utilize a hybrid form of the state Qualification Based
Selection (QBS) procedure for our orthophoto/elevation contours
project as reported last month.  We will use the standard state
QBS procedure.  Our sub-committee will meet next month to begin the
consultant selection procedure.
 
I attended a GIS oriented lunch meeting for Ohio University alums
working in state government in the Columbus area.  Mark Weinberg,
Director of ILGARD hosted the meeting and several Ohio University
students displayed GIS posters.  Our local GIS efforts were well
received.
 
Ken, J.B., Darren, and I met to resolve some questions encountered
during our parcel conversion process.  Our current platting system
consists of some parcels made up of sub-tracts with each sub-tract
having a portion of the overall acreage noted.  The existing Auditor
plat scheme does not assign PINs to these sub-tracts, rather only a
PIN for the whole parcel.  However, an accounting of sub-tracts is
needed in the day-to-day Auditor operation.  We will include sub-tract
lines and sub-tract acreage, and possibly some other text as a
separate annotation layer that may be used as an overlay to the main
parcel map.  Including these sub-tract items in a separate layer
solves the problem of having to create separate accounting numbers for
each parcel sub-tract and then having to dissolve the sub-tract
numbers when combining the sub-tracts under the overall parcel map
layer. This system will preserve the existing Auditor's PIN system by
providing the separate sub-tract annotation layer as a tool to be used
by the Auditor's staff when they work with sub-tracts.
 
ArcView 8.1 is shipping.  Windows 2000 Professional operating system
is required to run 8.1.  New features include:
 
* Internet enabled
* Improved data manipulation
* Metadata search tool
* Geocoding from ArcMap
 
Our GIS Steering Committee did not meet in May.  Our next Steering
Committee meeting will be held on July 19th at 10:00 a.m. in the
ILGARD conference room.
 
Attached is an article titled GIS-The Wave of the Future for
Information Analysis.  It describes an excellent statewide GIS effort
in New York.
 
Thank you for allowing me to coordinate this important aspect of
Athens County's future.
 
Archie Stanley
GIS Coordinator
555 East State Street
Athens, Ohio 45701
Phone (740) 593-5514
Fax (740) 592-4616
E-mail: astanley@frognet.net