GIS Data Archive
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Hi. I have been working on GIS projects from early 90's. I have a very big archive of GIS data like photos,ESRI shape files etc.In this moments all this data is organized in folders that keep the name of the project.Our company needs an archive to keep all this data organized in some way they can be searched or used easily.From your experience which is the best way to manage this large amount of information?I repeat that this data are of different formats. Best regards
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Hi. I have been working on GIS projects from early 90's. I have a very big archive of GIS data like photos,ESRI shape files etc.In this moments all this data is organized in folders that keep the name of the project.Our company needs an archive to keep all this data organized in some way they can be searched or used easily.From your experience which is the best way to manage this large amount of information?I repeat that this data are of different formats. Best regards
When you talk about searching do you mean to search into the files (such as searching keywords in some of the files)? If so, you need to first create a keyword file for each GIS project. Then use Windows Desktop Search or Google Desktop to index the files. The GIS projects will still be stored in their original folder structures so they can be used easily. You can also create your own database tables and save the keywords and projects' locations into the database. You may need to develop a certain interface to query the database and launch GIS projects from it.
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When you talk about searching do you mean to search into the files (such as searching keywords in some of the files)? If so, you need to first create a keyword file for each GIS project. Then use Windows Desktop Search or Google Desktop to index the files. The GIS projects will still be stored in their original folder structures so they can be used easily. You can also create your own database tables and save the keywords and projects' locations into the database. You may need to develop a certain interface to query the database and launch GIS projects from it.
I mean not to search by projects but developing a regular archive where u can search the same as you do when u enter at Google maps or maybe by some other criteria I don't know. I know that my question is some-kind very general but I need some opinions. Best regards
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I mean not to search by projects but developing a regular archive where u can search the same as you do when u enter at Google maps or maybe by some other criteria I don't know. I know that my question is some-kind very general but I need some opinions. Best regards
I use ArcInfo at work, and I know the nightmare you're talking about. We intially paid a consulting company to map our electrical utility system and provide us with a geodatabase and supporting shapefiles. Since then the tribe has created a GIS office to provide mapping services, and they've been very helpful by providing files to add to our system. But finding those files and organizing them in some logical fashion that makes it easy to locate specific feature sets is a hellish task. Re-organizing them is out of the question; if I move a file it will break every map ever created that depends on it. There is no tool I know of that will automatically revise .mxd files with new locations for the files that move. The file names that the GIS group uses don't in any way indicate what the files may contain, so a simple search isn't very helpful. I like the idea of creating an index that can be searched; the keys have to be meaningful, though, and should be accompanied by a detailed description. The keys should not be arranged by project. They have to include keywords that a user would select to describe a particular feature set - "power poles in Section 10" for instance.
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"