BLM and USFS Implement Enterprise GIS

Federal GIS Connection, Winter 2002-2003

Managing survey and land records information is a challenge faced by local jurisdictions everywhere. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) have this responsibility for nearly 500 million acres of public lands, with the BLM managing an additional 300 million acres of subsurface mineral resources. In an era of smaller budgets, increasing workloads, and shrinking workforces, keeping up with this workload is an ominous proposition for any organization. To meet this challenge, the BLM and USFS have joined together with a consortium of state, county, and private organizations to develop several applications, which, combined, constitute the National Integrated Land System (NILS).

NILS is comprised of several applications including Survey Management, Measurement Management, Land Survey Information System, GeoCommunicator, and a yet-to-be-released application called Parcel Management. The GeoCommunicator application was deployed in 2001 and the Land Survey Information System was deployed in April 2002. These two applications are located at www.geocommunicator.gov and www.geocommunicator.gov/lsi/ and provide Web access to BLM data and GIS resources.

In October 2002, the BLM announced the first deployment of the Survey Management and Measurement Management modules of NILS. This is the first in a series of articles looking at this cutting-edge, cross-jurisdictional project.

BLM's Survey and Measurement Management Applications

The BLM contracted with ESRI Professional Services to design and implement the NILS enterprise GIS solution. The project began with an in-depth analysis of the BLM's business processes required for managing survey and land records data using an integrated field-to-fabric approach. Upon completion of the initial user needs analysis, a system architecture design was developed based on these requirements and the expected user loads. A centralized architecture employing Windows Terminal Server and Citrix technology was designed to maximize perfor-mance while minimizing bandwidth require-ments from the BLM's distributed user base.

The first release of the Survey Management and Measurement Management applications was deployed in October 2002. These applications include a set of custom components developed by the Professional Services Group on top of the ArcGIS and Survey Analyst technology. NILS provides a business solution to land managers that unifies the worlds of surveying and GIS technology through a nationwide data model, a measurement management engine to analyze survey data, and parcel creation and maintenance tools. The integration of surveying and GIS provides land managers with a complete field-to-fabric technology solution. "The beauty of NILS is that it provides the tools to allow professional surveyors and GIS technicians to work together in an integrated system to improve the accuracy and the value of mapping data that will allow for better decision making," says Jack Craven, director of lands for the U.S. Forest Service.

The release of the Survey and Measurement Management modules will serve as the foundation for the entire NILS application by providing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products, custom NILS applications, a land records geodatabase, GIS architecture, and a managed work environment. "We are very excited about the release of NILS Survey and Measurement," said Bob Anderson, the BLM's acting assistant director for minerals, realty, and resource management. "About 85 percent of our requirements went into the development of ESRI's new ArcGIS Survey Analyst and other ESRI software. This is a huge savings to the government and a benefit to everyone to be able to leverage COTS products that are available to everyone."

The NILS geodatabase model is based upon ESRI's ArcGIS Parcel Data Model, which was developed by a consortium of cadastral and parcel subject matter experts. The model is based upon, and meets the requirements of, the Federal Geographic Data Committee's (FGDC) Cadastral Data Content Standard. The implementation of the model will include conversion of the data from the NAD27 to the NAD83 datum, as well as the development of a seamless national data set. The survey and parcel data will serve as the foundation for a national multipurpose cadastre.

The first deployment of Survey Management and Measurement Management applications include tools to accomplish the following activities for both public land survey and mete and bound areas:

• Import the Geographic Coordinate Data Base (GCDB—a BLM repository of measurement data) into the geodatabase.
• Create the legal description lines and polygons.
• Link the legal description data to the survey data.
• Edgematch the legal description data.
• Validate the legal description topology.
• Merge survey points that represent the same geographic location.
• Implement the merging process business rules.
• Attribute legal description feature classes with their legal descriptions and link them to the measurement management network.
• Implement the quality assurance tools required to validate and verify the integrity of the legal description fabric.
• Automate the business rules for edgematching geometries and validating topology.

Survey Management and Measurement Management are built on top of ESRI's ArcGIS and its Survey Analyst extension. Several innovative custom software capabilities have also been incorporated into the applications. Among the custom applications is a work flow management framework.

Work Flow Management

A set of custom work flow management tools has been developed to help the BLM standardize and automate many of its land management activities. The Workflow Manager guides users through all the necessary GIS and non-GIS tasks required to complete an entire business process. "Managing the work flow of an entire business process is important to the success of NILS," said Leslie Cone, BLM's NILS program manager. "Much of the valuable institutional knowledge about our core business activities is in the hands of an aging workforce that is spread across the nation. The work flow management tools provide a mechanism for capturing these business processes and standardizing them for use across the BLM."

The development of the BLM work flows began with the elaboration of detailed use cases by ESRI Professional Services that capture the existing BLM survey and land management activities. These use cases were used as the basis for the development of specific work flow "jobs." In a simplistic view, a job represents a (typically large) unit of work, such as a land exchange, that must be tracked and managed through its life cycle.

The Workflow Manager application is browser-based and provides the main entry point to the NILS application for the majority of NILS users. In addition to standardizing work flows, it serves as a guide for staff in their day-to-day activities while also providing a mechanism for tracking that job’s status and providing accountability and control in BLM work processes. Once an active job has been selected, users are provided with a series of tasks that must be completed to finish that job. The framework supports the assignment of responsibility for each task within a job to a specific individual or user role—only surveyors can do survey tasks, realty specialists are assigned specific tasks, and so on. Once a task is completed, a message can be sent to the person responsible for the next task in the work flow. Within the Workflow Manager interface, users can view and report on jobs, track job status, initiate new jobs, assign job responsibilities, define the job’s area of interest, and complete individual job tasks.

When a GIS task is initiated through the work flow, a Task Assistant tool is provided to guide the users through the steps in the querying or editing activities required within ArcGIS. The Task Assistant is a custom extension to the ArcGIS application that includes a dockable window with a list of steps that guide the user through a series of tasks. The Task Assistant is designed to standardize the specific ArcGIS steps required for a task and allows surveyors, realty specialists, and novice GIS users to quickly and correctly complete complicated GIS operations.

Future articles will explore such topics as the application architecture, geodatabase model, and what benefits these organizations hope to realize by implementing these applications.

For more information, please contact
Leslie Cone, BLM Project Manager, leslie_cone@blm.gov
Jim McGinnis, USFS, jmcginnis@fs.fed.us
Kate Taylor, ESRI Project Manager, ktaylor@esri.com