In the spatial technology arena, government is both a technology innovator and a technology consumer. Too often, however, government technology development investment activities are disconnected from government technology acquisitions. In recent years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer laboratories have been working with GIS industry leaders to better integrate the Corps of Engineers development investments in spatial technology with the Department of Defense (DOD) spatial technology acquisitions. One example of this government industry spatial technology partnering is the open geodata interoperability specification (OGIS), which was initially conceived through a Corps laboratory research effort, is now being developed through an industry consortium, will soon be tested on various military installations, the offered by industry as an extension of their spatial technology product line and eventually purchased by many DOD consumers. Other examples include the development of the Tri-Service Spatial Data Standard, and recent partnering led by the Tri-Service CADD/GIS Center, between the U.S. Army Construction Engineering research Laboratory, the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) and the Installation Spatial Technology Advisory Board in the development, fielding and application of GIS based decision support technologies for land management on military installations.
Fort Lewis has been developing GIS applications for the Environmental and Natural Resources Division of Public Works for over eight years. The GIS Lab has provided database development, analysis, and map production for numerous environmental programs including cultural resources, forestry, wildlife/habitat management, pollution prevention, NEPA, and other Army programs. For the majority of that period, FRASS (Geographical Resources Analysis Support System)was implemented. GRASS was developed by USA-CERL for the U.S. Army and was deployed to numerous installations including Fort Lewis. Recently, however, considering the uncertain outlook for further GRASS development and support, and as other off-the-shelf software has developed and overtaken GRASS capabilities, the GIS lab has migrated to the GIS that fit their needs better, that being ArcInfo and ArcView. Now the GRASS database must be converted to ARC format, and analysis, display, and output must be relearned. This conversion, though possible, is not automated or simple, and takes a great amount of time to perform correctly. We hope to make this process clearer for those who have invested their time, money and efforts into developing their GRASS databases and yet feel the need to expand their GIS horizons.