Geographic Information
Systems (GIS)

Featured in the latest Rapid Responder release, Geographic Information System (GIS) functionality provides users with a geographically representative image of selected features. The features available include a depiction of physical characteristics such as surface streets, railroads or hydrology (e.g. bodies of water or rivers). The representation additionally includes political subdivisions such as a county or state boundaries, or metropolitan areas.

At first look, there is a tendency to consider the GIS output a fancy map. But GIS provides the user with much more than a map. In fact, a typical GIS system is so powerful that if all of the stored content were presented to a user, the desired information would be completely eclipsed by the other data sets. One of the powerful aspects of GIS is that the user has control over the display of certain types of data (or layers). For example, if the user wanted to understand which airports might be near an underground petroleum pipeline, the GIS system could be configured to render a display of only the pipelines and airports in the area of interest.

The user can thus filter out other information that impedes understanding of a situation of interest. Once the user has identified the airport of interest, information on how to transit from the airport to a pipeline of interest can be developed by activating the surface street layer to select a desirable transit route. All GIS outputs are enhanced with descriptive data including scale, extents (decimal – degree format) and distance bar.

In the first set of GIS functionality, Rapid Responder features key data sets for emergency planning including:

Prepared Response’s GIS functionality is based on standard map file formats and the open source GIS application, Map Server v. 4.6.1, an application developed in conjunction with NASA. The entire application operates on a Windows Server operating system and is managed with IIS 6.0. This configuration provides a stable, well tested, high performance GIS environment and further offers a sound basis for extending the feature set as well as aggregating data from new sources. The configuration also allows for clustering multiple servers for load balancing and failover. Finally, our operating environment resides in a state of the art data center featuring multi-homed transmission, redundant power and biometric security provisions.

The application and data sets have been specifically tuned to render spatially–enabled content for Internet applications. As such, the map content is not only rendered rapidly on the server side, but due to its small file size, it can be transmitted more quickly than heavier, non-optimized content. PRI presently offers over 18GB of shape file data covering the United States from sources including U.S. Federal Agencies, states and high quality commercial data providers.