—Robert Heselton, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
The Fort Worth District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is the data steward for over 250,000 current and historic GIS datasets from multiple data sources for use with military and civil works projects. Maintaining this legacy GIS data manually is not practical from time and funding constraints as well as the active or historical status of a project. The problem then is a large quantity of legacy GIS data that needs work to make it usable for a reactivated project. The solution for the Fort Worth District was the creation of custom ArcCatalog GIS tools that generate pyramids and statistics, create image catalogs, define projections, and import, export, or create metadata recursively. Because the tools can work on datasets from a starting workspace and work recursively down the tree, they save time and money while making the GIS data usable and more compliant with federal and agency standards.