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Track: Data Publishing
Doug Atkinson
Information Technology Outreach Services
1180 E Broad St
Athens, GA 30602-5418
Telephone: 706-542-5329
Fax: 706-542-6535
E-mail: dougis@itos.uga.edu
Anita Russo, Erik Shepard
A Method for Designing and Generating Publication-Quality Report Documents
Defining Issue: Generating a report can be a cumbersome task, especially when the report contains complicated data expressions and the final output must be a publication-quality document. The task becomes more difficult if the person generating the report is not an experienced computer user. GIS Solution: Information Technology Outreach Services (ITOS) at the University of Georgia has developed the Georgia 100 GIS which, among other things, makes it simple for any user to generate publication-quality reports. Methodology: In partnership with the users of the Georgia 100 GIS, ITOS identified a set of data items that are frequently requested from the system and arranged them into a series of precomposed report templates. The system's GUI allows the user to define a geographic region of interest and to choose one of the report templates. Then, after a point-and-click request, a publication-quality document describing the results of the analysis is automatically generated. Software: The report templates
were designed using WordPerfect and saved in HTML format. The system uses ARC Macro Language and external C++ and Perl code controlled by the TASK function to populate the templates with calculated values. The final documents are translated to PostScript for viewing and printing. The paper will describe the methodology used to design the layouts and to generate the standard reports.
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