As managers and users of geographic data, we have long recognized that people throughout an organization must be able to easily share spatial information and engage in collaborative problem solving. However, it has only been recently that we've had all the necessary technologies, such as Spatial Database Engine (SDE) technology, coupled with client/server computing environment and relational database management technologies, to realize our enterprise goal: having data entered once, and used by many. But, how do you approach the integration of SDE technology into an established GIS enterprise? This paper provides some answers to this important question. In this paper, we discuss ways that the Southern Region of the Forest Service has begun to investigate SDE technology and present a framework that we have used to define and guide the SDE pilot project.

The Southern Region of the USDA Forest Service manages nearly 5 million hectares of land throughout the southeastern United States, ranging from Virginia to Oklahoma, including Puerto Rico. In 1986, the Southern Region embarked on a mission to implement advanced information technologies, of which Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology was a major part, to assist people at all levels of the organization to better manage the natural resources and care for public lands.

Over the past ten years, the Region has created the world's largest natural resource GIS database. The Region has built and delivered vertically integrated GIS databases to its forests and districts using ArcInfo, our corporate GIS technology. The Region has created GIS application tools to support staff in performing wildlife, land planning, archeology, and timber analyses; implemented Oracle, as the corporate relational database management technology; and developed and implemented a series of application tools for maintaining standard vertically integrated GIS databases across the region.

The Region has recently begun investigating ways to seamlessly integrate multiple technologies to deliver GIS information and capability to our customers in the Forest Service, the public, and other organizations. We have long recognized that people throughout the agency and beyond must be able to easily share spatial information and engage in collaborative problem solving.

The Spatial Database Engine (SDE) technology, coupled with our existing client/server and relational database management technologies, will allow the public and Forest Service users to access natural resource data collected by the Region. SDE may also serve as a data warehouse for Forest Service databases. With this in mind, the Southern Region and Esri, in cooperation with the Forest Service's GIS Center of Excellence, have begun to explore and demonstrate the integration of Spatial Database Engine (SDE) technology into our established GIS enterprise. This paper describes the framework that we used to define and guide the SDE pilot project.

There are three primary purposes of the SDE pilot project. First, the project will evaluate SDE technology to determine how it might be integrated into our existing information system environment to best serve our user communities at the district, forest, and regional levels. Next, the project will test the suitability of SDE technology in supporting tabular and spatial queries built from standard Southern Region databases. Finally, the project will demonstrate how SDE technology could help us deliver natural resource databases to the public, other organizations, and throughout the Forest Service via the Internet and our internal wide area network. The steps we used to define the requirements of pilot project are presented below.

Pilot Application Roadmap

The Region's standard business process approach was used to help us define the scope of the SDE pilot project. This approach insured that SDE technology was considered in terms of specific Forest Service business processes. We performed a thorough investigation of the SDE technology. We focused our attention on the people who were likely to use SDE technology and considered the typical work processes that might be involved.

The results of the investigation were presented in a business-oriented document entitled, "The Pilot Application Roadmap." The information presented in this document helped us to determine whether or not the SDE pilot project was warranted. The document presented the preliminary goals and objectives of the proposed pilot project, defined the potential user community, identified a series of business requirements, described our existing technology environment, and identified a relevant pilot database. Each of these elements is discussed below.

Pilot Project Goals and Objectives - The primary goal of the pilot project is to determine if SDE technology will support collaborative problem-solving in a timely manner by providing GIS information and capability to people who want it, when they want it. We also want to determine the strengths and limitations of this technology to support real-time spatial queries across the Region's distributed computing environment and the Internet. The objectives of the pilot project are:

To demonstrate the ability of SDE to serve spatial and tabular data built from standard Southern Region databases.
To test SDE functionality using interagency and multi-scale data.
To test the performance of SDE using typical GIS databases queries.
To test SDE network performance across the Region's distributed computing environment.
To test SDE performance via the Internet to serve Forest Service data to the public, other organizations, and throughout the agency.

User Community - The user community for the pilot project consists of two typical segments: an Internet user and Arcview user. These segments include novice and experienced GIS users, respectively. The Internet user community includes any person, from the public, Forest Service or other organization who has access to the Internet. By our definition, the Internet user is capable of using a browser to visit a website and conduct spatial queries on an interagency GIS database. The Internet application is designed to be a point and click "easy-to-use" GIS tool with pre-programmed "button" queries for performing recurring monitoring and status queries on the test database via the Internet. All Internet users view identical data regardless of whether they are the public, Forest Service personnel, or another organization. The primary purpose of the Internet application is to determine the query requirements of this segment of the user community and test data delivery performance over the Internet.

The Arcview user community is comprised of Forest Service personnel who have access to Arcview, our corporate GIS viewer. By our definition, the Arcview user is capable of using Arcview to view and query GIS data. The Arcview application is created using Internet Map Server (IMS) extensions to Arcview 3.0. The Arcview user has complete Arcview 3.0 functionality on the test database. The application is designed to have a similar "look and feel" as the Internet application and will support remote GIS queries using the Region's wide area network and the Internet. The primary purpose of the Arcview application is to test the suitability of SDE for performing typical Forest Service GIS queries across the region's information environment.

Business Requirements - The Forest Service promotes active monitoring of land management decisions by the public, Forest Service personnel, or other organizations. SDE may provide an avenue for all interested parties to more actively participate in the land management planning process. It may also provide a means for interested parties to monitor activities set forth by the forest land management plans.

The Forest Service is obligated to provide information as requested by the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). SDE technology provides a potential means for delivering requested information to the public in a timely and efficient manner.

The Southern Region has invested over $12 million in the creation of standard vertically integrated GIS databases to support natural resource management at all levels of the region. SDE may provide an additional conduit for Forest Service personnel to use GIS databases to support collaborative problem solving.

Technology Environment - GIS technology has been widely used to support land management in the Southern Region since the middle 1980's. During this period, the Region has built and delivered vertically integrated GIS databases to its forests and districts using ArcInfo. Recently, the Region has started to implement corporate IBM technology, Esri's GIS software, Oracle's relational database management software and a variety of other technologies throughout the region.

Region-wide telecommunication services using high-speed T1 and frame-relay circuits are installed at most locations throughout the region. The Region has established local area networks and a wide area network operating on TCP-IP Ethernet architecture at all facilities. Internet capability is provided throughout the region. Together, these technologies provide the telecommunications backbone for the Region's highly distributed information environment.

Pilot Database - We determined that the Southern Appalachian Assessment (SAA) database was ideal for testing SDE technology. The SAA database was chosen because it fulfilled the following acceptance criteria:

The database is an interagency data set
The database consists of different scales of spatial data
The database is current and relevant to the user community
The database supports ecosystem management
The database covers a large geographic area
The database consists of standard Southern Region spatial and tabular information
The database is easily distributed during the development of the pilot project

We started the next step in the process after completing the pilot application roadmap. We used the Information Needs Assessment (INA) to help us define the scope of the SDE pilot project. The project INA helped us to define example queries to the SDE database and determine the types of data that were required to support these queries. Participants attending the INA represented several user segments. Representatives from the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition and the Southern Forest Products Council as well as Forest Service users from different organizational levels attended the meeting. These participants helped design the appearance and functionality of the Internet application. They were also instrumental in defining over two dozen example queries. The queries represented typical questions posed from different segments of the total user community. They also address scale issues of data, complexities of analysis, and test overall performance.

The final step in this process was the formal definition of the SDE pilot project. At this point, we determined the initial scope of the pilot project; determined preliminary project costs, and created a work breakdown schedule (WBS) to manage project implementation. In addition, we identified a series of issues to be investigated by the SDE pilot project. These issues are presented below.

What are the implications of a single projection requirement of SDE on the accuracy of regional and local queries?
What are the data management and maintenance implications of converting existing data to SDE format?
What is the optimal database structure for implementing SDE technology?
What are the technical implications for implementing SDE region-wide?
What are the hardware, software and connectivity requirements for implementing SDE?
What are the probable impacts of future SDE version modifications?
What are the minimum acceptable training requirements to use SDE technology in performing daily work?

We determined that the pilot project should be performed in a phased manner to properly evaluate the performance of SDE technology under typical conditions represented by different user segments, connectivity, hardware, and software configurations. The first phase concentrates on developing an ArcView application that provides Forest Service users with access to the SAA database. In this phase we are evaluating the suitability of SDE to work within our existing information environment. The second phase focuses on providing Internet access to the SAA database. Figure 1 illustrates the implementation approach for both phases.

Figure 1 - The SDE Pilot Project Implementation Approach

We start the first phase by migrating data layers defined in the INA process from the SAA database into a SDE environment. Next, we begin to design an ArcView 3.0 interface to the SDE database. The interface is modified to include a series of pre-programmed queries using buttons, menus, and tools. Users are able to construct ad hoc query to the SAA database using standard ArcView 3.0 functionality. This approach allows ArcView users anywhere in the region to perform "real-time" queries to the SAA database via the Forest Service wide area network.

In the second phase, a "mirror" copy of the SAA database will be hosted by a Unix SDE server at Esri. The Internet application is designed using Internet Map Server (IMS) extensions to ArcView 3.0 and MapObjects. This design enables us to better manage client/server requests and provide the necessary pre-programmed "button" queries. Using this approach, we are able to deliver maps and tables generated from Forest Service data to the public, Forest Service users, and other organizations using the Internet.

We quickly realized that the proposed SDE pilot project would be the first of its kind attempted by an established GIS enterprise such as the Southern Region. The issues to investigate are numerous. We implemented the SDE pilot project to understand the technical implications of SDE technology on our established GIS enterprise. But soon, we understood that if our SDE pilot project is successful, then the technology will have profound impacts on the business of the Forest Service.

SDE will provide a way to deliver "real-time" information to the public. As a result, the role of the public in managing their national forests will be redefined. The public will likely be drawn by the simplicity of using standard Web browser technology and SDE-enabled applets to access Forest Service databases. This will provide an avenue for all interested parties to more actively participate in the land management process. It may also provide a means for interested parties to monitor activities set forth by the forest land management plans. SDE technology is likely to be a catalyst for changing other Forest Service business processes by allowing us to develop new ways to access and deliver information internally throughout the agency.