The Marine Corps Base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, is home to a prosperous active duty, dependent, retiree, and civilian personnel population. The base supports a variety of missions ranging from environmental programs to quality-of-life programs. However, the main duty at Camp Lejeune is to provide the training of Marine Air and Ground Task Forces to protect our country. To help manage the base's infrastructure, Camp Lejeune is migrating its mature, basewide GIS from ArcInfo coverages to an Oracle ArcSDE geodatabase environment.

Beginning in 1992, the Commanding General at Camp Lejeune expanded the role of the GIS to serve multiple Business processes and established the Command Integrated Geographic Information Repository (IGIR). The IGIR is an enterprise solution Camp Lejeune uses to satisfy its need to share geographic knowledge for cross-functional planning and daily Business operations. Further capitalizing on its investments in data and resources, many organizations at Camp Lejeune have worked together to leverage GIS technology and information sharing through the use of the IGIR. By sharing data and resources, Camp Lejeune has overcome the disparate data infrastructure they were encountering.

Managed by several departments at Camp Lejeune, the IGIR promotes cost-effective sharing of knowledge and supports the base's core missions via ArcView and ArcInfo applications and an interactive ArcIMS Web site. The IGIR enables multi-user access to a comprehensive collection of data layers, along with the links to external databases, aerial photography, engineering drawing files, and photographs or images. The IGIR acts as a tool to aid in decision making and process involvement at the base and satisfies the base's need to coordinate the development of the database.

In its vision to continually evolve the knowledge base of geographic information, Camp Lejeune contracted with URS Corporation, a construction design and management firm headquartered in San Francisco, California, to manage the migration of both the base's data and its software applications to the ArcGIS environment. URS contracted with Esri's regional office in Charlotte, North Carolina, to migrate the comprehensive data set to an Oracle ArcSDE solution. Esri-Charlotte contracted, in turn, with G/I/S, Inc., an Esri Business Partner, in Birmingham, Alabama, to design a geodatabase that complied with the CADD/GIS Technology Center's (Vicksburg, Mississippi) spatial data standards.

The first phase of the data migration for IGIR was completed in October 2001; 206 coverages were converted to more than 220,000 features in 35 data sets and 115 feature classes. The geodatabase resulting from the conversion of the coverages and a set of applications are scheduled to be deployed in December 2001. The same geodatabase will contain the utilities data used to maintain base water, wastewater, and electric utilities, but before the conversion of the base maintenance data can begin, an SDS-compliant data model must be developed, complete with rules and relationships. This data model is being developed by Esri-Charlotte, with additional funding expected to be provided by the CADD/GIS Technology Center.

The next phase of the project will be to inventory the existing software applications. The inventory will be used to plan both the migration of existing applications to the ArcGIS environment and the development of new applications. The planning for the new applications will depend to a large extent on a system design strategy being developed by Esri's systems integration team.

For further information, please contact Chris McGuire, Esri-Charlotte (tel.: 704-541-9810, e-mail: cmcguire@esri.com).