The Arizona State Land Department is in the process of developing a GIS application to aid in the management of over 9 million acres of state trust land. This system, known as the Parcel and Land Management System (PALMS), is being developed in ArcView. ArcView was chosen for its ability to provide both an intuitive, easy-to-learn interface for novice users while at the same time delivering powerful analytical and query tools for the more sophisticated user. The ability to further leverage the Land Department's ArcInfo installation, including the flexibility to expand the system via networked PCs as well as UNIX-based workstations, was also an advantage.
As might be expected in the design of a system to provide numerous users access to large volumes of both spatial and tabular data, there are tradeoffs to be made. The core data for the system is comprised of a spatial data set of land lease parcels, which is coupled with data extracted from the business systems lease parcel database stored in INGRES. Various data configurations have been explored in an effort to obtain the best mix of optimization for performance in use, project initialization time, and ease of database maintenance. It is these design issues that we wish to share in this presentation.
Scott Hutchinson
Arizona State Land Department
GIS Coordinator
Telephone: 602-542-2619
Email: shutch@ind.state.az.us