Development of The Engineering GIS/Database Document Organization System (GDOS)

Maryland Transportation Authority (MdTA) engineering has acquired a large amount of data over many years relating to the construction, rehabilitation, upgrade, and continuing maintenance of roadways, tunnels, bridges, and ancillary buildings. Much of the data collected in the past is in hardcopy format only and organized by project in the file rooms. Finding data by project is often difficult and error prone and Engineering would like the ability to have the data organized in several ways simultaneously, including by project, locations, keyword, type of work, etc.

The type of research required for each assigned project would determine which organizational method would be used to find data. The only reasonable method to overlap such disparate organizational systems is to use relational databases. The GIS integration is desired since it provides a reasonable and intuitive method to link geographic locations with stored data.

Two phases, which are described in the following sections, are involved in this proposed work. The first phase focuses on the establishment of the database and the implementation of the system functions that are non-GIS interface related. Tasks in this phase form the foundation of the whole project and are considered essential to the success of the project. The second phase focuses on building the linkage between documents and projects in the database that were established in the first phase and their corresponding geographic locations. In this phase, specific query functions based on the GIS interfaces will also be provided. Included in the GIS development, two tasks are involved: (1) for Local Area Network (LAN)/Intranet users, ArcGIS as well as Oracle client user environment will be developed for a direct link between ArcInfo and Oracle database and (2) for Wide Area Network (WAN)/Internet users, two options are proposed: (a) HTTP plus MapEnd user environment will be developed for tying MapEnd and MapServer. (b) ArcIMS with ArcSDE