As a GIS grows the need to document and share databases becomes increasingly important. Librarian and ArcStorm provide good tools for storing coverages. The problem for many sites, including ours, is how to standardize and store the lookup tables. A lookup table as defined by Esri includes the relate item from the coverage, an item called symbol, and optionally a description item used in a legend. In order to create a single lookup table that meets everyone's needs a more robust structure was required. This structure needed to handle multiple symbol items, a method for setting up the symbol environment in ArcPlot to work with the selected symbol item, the ability to add other items such as a dxf_layer item or an item for reclassifying a field into groups. This flexibility allows for a more normalized data structure, where all of the unique information about a classification is stored in a single shared table. The usage of the lookup table must be easy to use and provide enough benefits that users will want to use the central system. With these guidelines in mind Clark County put together a collection of tools that has made it easier to create maps, easier to edit coverages, and has provided a very useful form of on-line documentation. The most obvious benefit derived from this method is that standardized symbol sets are readily available for every layer. This has dramatically decreased the amount of time and frustration required to create a custom map. Another benefit is that the update menus in ARCEDIT present the user with the description fields instead of the numeric codes stored in the coverages which has increased the quality of our data. This paper will present the structure of our lookup table database and discuss the atools used to make the system work. The atools will be submitted to the AML Applications Contest so that they are available to other agencies.
Many organisations experience the evolution of their GIS to an organisation wide system, or, see their GIS become an integrated part of corporate IT-solutions. Nowadays, geodata are a part of the information infrastructure of almost any organisation. Further, the growth of the information superhighway facilitates datasharing. This means that geo-metadata (this is the metadata for geographical databases) must e approached from a comprehensive 'IT-point-of-view'. First, geo-metadata is vital to be able to incorporate GIS in an organisations corporate IT-infrastructure. Second, geo-metadata have to be integrated in a comprehensive meta information system. In this environment, different groups of users, from the database administrator to the general user, need different levels of metadata. In this paper, both the concept and a preliminary technical implementation of a meta-information system following this vision are discussed.