Integration of relational and spatial data has been a fundamental goal of those responsible for managing facilities and infrastructure for many years - the power to visualize, query and analyze data geographically. The geographic information system allows us to work with data in an entirely new way, understanding data relationships that were previously hidden, solving problems, achieving results thought not possible ten years ago. Once we've made the maps we want, it's easy to add tabular data from various database servers, onto our map so that we can organize our data geographically. The true power of GIS lies in how easy it enables us to solve problems by uncovering and analyzing trends and patterns. The purpose of the Facility Utilization Survey Facility Geographic Information System, Authorized under Contract No. DACA27-97-D-0002, Delivery Order 0005, is to provide a tool for more efficient use of existing facilities and improve long range planning of those facilities. The space utilization drawings were prepared for each building and show floor plan, size, and use of each room. Utilization database files were linked to the drawings and provide information on rooms and buildings by category code, function and using organization. Reports and queries can be created to determine utilization, space adequacy, and condition. The major products produced by this survey include digital drawing and utilization database files, the customized GIS application and user manual.

Overview

Today people use computers to perform many tasks that they once carried out by using other tools. Computers have replaced typewriters, for example, as the primary mean of creating and modifying documents. They've replaced electronic calculators as the best way to do math. They've also replaced millions of pieces of paper, file folders, and file cabinets as the principal storage medium for important formation. Compared to these old tools, of course, computers do a lot more, a lot faster - and with greater accuracy.⁵

The Air Force Reserve Command (AFRC), recognizing the benefit of such automation, contracted Nakata Planning Group, LLC, to perform a utilization study of its facilities at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base (NAS-JRB) New Orleans in southern most Louisiana. Developing an automated system with associated database to record the study was a central part of that effort.

History

Nakata Planning Group uses systems automation and database development as a component of analysis in its everyday work. Therefore the application was originally developed as an in-house tool to support planning and analysis. However it has expanded into a useful installation management and decision support tool. Consequently Nakata Planning Group has performed facilities utilization surveys and studies for Department of Defense (DOD) facilities worldwide over the last nine years and recently completed development of automated space management and decision support systems (VISION 2000 SPACE™) for a number of these installations.

The NAS JRB is located adjacent to Belle Chase, Louisiana in Plaquemines Parish. The station lies approximately 16 roadway miles south of the New Orleans Central Business District. The installation is situated between the Mississippi River on the southeast and the Inter-coastal Waterway to the northwest. The NAS JRB occupies approximately 3,250 acres. Of this area the Air Force Reserve (AFR) and Air National Guard (ANG) occupy approximately 100 areas in the heart of the airfield operations, industrial, and administrative portions of the NAS. The Reserve leases a total of 30 facilities from the Navy. The primary mission of NAS JRB New Orleans is to train Naval Reservist for mobilization. The installation also supports a number of tenant organizations including the Air Force Reserve, Louisiana Air National Guard, United States Customs, Marine Reserve, and United States Coast Guard. The installation has a potential population approximately of 7,000 persons.

How we got here?

Populating the database

Met with users and followed the following sequence of steps:

1. Decided what objects were relevant to the solution and to be included in our database,
2. Determined which of these objects should be tables and which should be columns in those tables, and
3. Defined tables according to our determination of how objects needed to be organized.⁴

What we have now?

The major products produced during the survey include digital and hard copy drawings, facility utilization tracking database, the Facility Utilization Study (FUS) report, and the NAS Facility Geographic Information System (FGIS) application and database, and FUS FGIS User's Guide.³

Where are we going?

Departmental GIS⁶

Enterprise GIS⁶

Internet Level GIS⁶

Strategic Plan

The creation of FGIS is almost always a good thing. The reason there is an almost in this sentence is that overzealous efforts can create expensive stovepipe information systems. What been described is an example of a very useful facility management information system. However, issues such as security, accessibility, integrality, data centricity, standardization, system sustainability, and documentation of data and DBMS weren't thoroughly addressed prior to the FUS FGIS creation. That does not mean that this FGIS wasn't success story. It already is. Developing a strategic plan for GIS will ensure that it will continue to be a success. This strategic plan is being developed at the Headquarter (HQ) Air Force Reserve Command (AFRC). Careful review of multiple DOD guidance, available on information management, revealed seven business principles that have to been further developed to ensure successful deployment and longevity of DOD GIS:

1. Security - Information must be secure. Control database access - who accesses, what data to do what, when, and from where.⁴
2. Accessibility - Information should be easily accessible and built around an open architecture. Databases serve many applications; therefore they must be application-neutral. Provide concurrency controls. The chance for corruption is greater with concurrent database access by multiple transactions, because they interfere with one another, increasing the potential for both failure and corruption.⁴
3. Integration - System should be readily integrable with existing databases and DBMS's.
4. Business Centricity - Applications should be business process oriented and not technology oriented or driven. Develop business baseline - various sources - personnel interviews, document reviews, etc.
5. Standardization - Constructed around widely accepted and supported industry standards.
6. Sustainability - Should be easily to operate and maintain. Ensures that no application violates the rules and corrupts the data - data integrity enforcement. Incorporates automatic recovery mechanism to anything that interrupts DBMS execution and threatens database corruption.
7. Documentation - Development strategy, Operation, Maintenance, Data, metadata, and DBMS all well documented.¹

The vision of DOD is to incorporate such principles into its GIS's. If there are no systems in place at an installation or if the existing systems fall short of these expectations recommends replace or modify the existing system to comply with the vision.

We have learned a great deal from this process and are excited about the prospect of sharing lessons learned with others who have a system in place or are about to attempt this endeavor.

If you're storing important data, you have the following four main concerns:⁵

1. Storing data needs to be quick and easy, because you're likely to do it often.
2. The storage medium must be reliable. You don't want to come back later and find some of (or all) your data missing.
3. Data retrieval needs to be quick and easy, regardless of the number of items you store.
4. You need an easy way to sift the exact information that you want from the tons of data that you don't want.

Biggest Investment is Data:

Our biggest investment in implementing geographic information system (GIS) wasn't the hardware or software or even the staff, but data maintenance and creation. The system required clean and well-defined data at the outset in order to run smoothly and grow. We determined that it is a good practice to carefully consider data creation, cleaning, updating, and error checking, whether you are creating new digital data from scratch or updating existing data.

We spent many weeks creating clean and well-defined data for use with our GIS. This is primarily because CAD and GIS have different data models. CAD is geared towards management the geometry of objects such as lines, curves, and text. GIS, on the other hand, is generally geared towards managing the relationships between the objects.

The Value is not in the data, but in the structure:

Years ago, some overly clever person calculated that, if you reduced a human being to his component carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms (plus trace of others), the person would be worth only 97 cents. This is clearly misleading assessment did grave damage to people's self-images around the world. People aren't composed of collections of atoms. Our atoms combine into enzymes, proteins, hormones, and many other substances that cost millions of dollars per once on the pharmaceutical market. The structure of the combinations of atoms is what gives them this value. Database structure makes possible the interpretation of seemingly meaningless data. The structure brings to the surface patterns, trends, and tendencies in the data. Unstructured data, as is true of uncombined atoms, has little or no value.⁵