APPENDIX C: GEOSPATIAL DATA MANAGEMENT SURVEY
The survey was conducted by research team members from CRREL and CERL on
a one-on-one basis with representative Districts and Divisions. Five USACE commands
participated in the survey: Jacksonville District, Mississippi Valley Division, Rock Island
District, Walla Walla District, and Philadelphia District. Anonymity was promised to
ensure open discussion of the issues.
The survey was conducted by at least two individuals at any one time. During the visits
to each site, interviews were conducted between three to eight persons responsible for
some facet of GD&S. No one functional element is responsible for GD&S at each organi-
zation, which stems from lack of USACE GD&S standard business practices. Interview-
ees were from the engineering, environmental planning, hydrology, information manage-
ment, and real estate elements of their organizations.
Geospatial data management survey questions
Data management
1. What is the biggest data management issue at your District?
2. What is the most important type of data at your District?
Data maintenance
3. Does your District do routine data maintenance? or is it other duties as assigned?
4. How often do you feel your data is updated?
5. What data layer/theme gets the most attention as far as maintenance goes?
6. What data layer/theme gets the least attention related to maintenance?
7. Do you feel data maintenance guidance or standards related to theme and fre-
quency of update would be followed at your District?
8. Do you `throw away' data if an updated layer comes in?
Data backups/storage
9. What is frequency of data backups at your District for CADD/GIS/RS data?
10. Do certain themes warrant more frequent backups?
Equipment currentness
11. Does your District have difficulty using various versions of the same software pack-
ages?
Naming conventions
12. Does your District use any naming conventions related to file or directory nam-
ing?
13. Do you maintain the same theme of data collected at various times?
14. Do you incorporate the date of the data with the name of the file?
15. Is there a record of what is in each file? (metadata-light)
16. Do multiple people have a `copy' of the same data layer?
17. Do multiple copies cause concern about what data is the most up to date? (version
control)
Data library
18. Does your District have a catalog of its geospatial data?
19. Does your District utilize the metadata standard?
20. What is the biggest road block to full utilization of the metadata standard?
21. Is there an SOP related to data acquisition?
22. Does your District prefer to store internet-accessible data on a "corporate" server
or a local server?
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