The National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) has announced that “Ramona” a Web-based GIS inventory system is ready to use, with an official release scheduled for March 21 st, 2006. Ramona, which was designed by NSGIC with financial support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has been developed to inventory the GIS data holdings of state, local, and tribal governments.
The primary selling points on Ramona are:
- Nationally, it provides one consistent inventory tool, and it designed to work in concert with the federal portal – Geospatial OneStop.
- Ramona users can create their own profile including information on their organization, systems, and data distribution and management.
- From entered information, Ramona automatically creates a basic Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) compliant metadata file that the user can choose to post to the OneStop portal.
- Information entered in to Ramona may be displayed through a map display.
Earlier this year a small group of people in Wisconsin tested Ramona when it was in its final design phase. Many changes were suggested at that time, some of which have been incorporated into the final product. Over the next six months the State Cartographer’s Office will continue to coordinate and evaluate Ramona’s potential as the state’s GIS inventory tool. We are particularly interested in determining if Ramona, or some variation of it, could serve as a replacement for the Wisconsin Land Information Program’s Annual County Survey. This survey has not been completed for the past two years.
At this time, Ramona has too many questions surrounding its design and content to warrant it being used as a full-scale replacement for the WLIP annual survey. As we evaluate Ramona further, we will be looking at ways to potentially combine or link the two so that both state and national needs can be satisfied.