When Pablo Ramirez finished with the prototype of the Real Estate Database he began to collect aerial photos, building information and digital photos for 285 buildings in the six major industrial parks in the area.  As the webmaster of Texas Centers, I was invited to participate on the project.   My role was to publish the maps and aerial photos on the Internet.  The only experience I had at the time was in how to create static and dynamic web sites.  That meant working with images and links.  The most difficult task I had undertaken was the creation of Internet forms that either collected or displayed information from a database through the web.




When I joined the Real Estate team, Pablo showed me what he had been doing with ArcView. I then started working with the ArcView tutorials to understand more about the functionality of the Esri software. Then the really hard part began. How was I supposed to make this project work on the Internet?  As a UTEP student, I knew there was a campus license of ArcView and that we also would require the Internet Map Server software in order to get the maps on the web.  We acquired the new application and installed the software on the web server.

In familiarizing myself with the Internet Map Server, I realized that this software used Map Café, which is a Java Applet that pulls the maps from ArcView onto the Internet. This was I big problem for me because I did not know how to use Java. I started reading books and experimenting with this language. I tried several times to bring the maps onto the web without any luck.  Then suddenly the map finally appeared on the web page.  I learned that in order to call a map onto a web page, you must actually create five different pages; 1) an html map title, 2) an html map, 3) an html map load, 4) an html map applet, and 5) a map cfm file.  Following this procedure I was able to post the first map on the Internet.




Through the process of the project development, errors started to appear.  I had to figure out how to solve these issues.  There were times when the maps would not load and this would result in a Map Café error I had never seen before.  Sometimes the problem was as simple as the fact that the maps were not being served.  However, if the maps were being served and they still didn’t load on the Internet, it was only by restarting the web server the that errors would be corrected and the maps appear.  In the worst cases, after checking to confirm that the maps were being served and restarting the web server, the maps still did not appear.  It was then that we would have to re-install the Internet Map Server.  This was the only thing that would resolve the problem.




In order to make the web site helpful in locating industrial facilities in El Paso, we began creating a search option on the site. It was developed by using Cold Fusion.  SQL (Simple Query Language) is a standard language for interacting with database applications.  All of the Cold Fusion databases at Texas Centers are created via ODBC (Open Data Base Connectivity).  We knew how to create a simple search of a web site, but the challenge with this project was to use Cold Fusion to call the digital photos and building information from the ArcView database onto the web.  The information was stored on the database as individual ArcView projects and we had to create a mechanism that would search all the projects for results, in effect, several single searches contributing to one overall search result.   




Finally, to customize the website and make it accessible to a general audience, a new member joined the Real Estate team.  This person was Qian Wen, a student at UTEP with a B.A. in English, taking her Master’s degree in Computer Science.