UITS Helps State Boost Security, Emergency Management, and Planning

INDIANAPOLIS – University Information Technology Services, with offices on the IUPUI and IU Bloomington campuses, is helping the state of Indiana take a bold step forward with the Statewide Digital Orthophotography Program.

This unprecedented program provides seamless, high resolution, color aerial photography for all of Indiana 's 92 counties. Counties will use the imagery to support homeland security, emergency management, and other business and government applications. The goal is to create – through an integrated, complementary and interoperable geographical information system – a current, accurate, statewide, seamless map at significantly reduced costs over county-by-county data collection.

UITS has partnered with the Indiana Geographic Information Council to host an enterprise geodatabase service for the Statewide Digital Orthophotography Program. The geodatabase service and associated web mapping services will make the valuable data resource readily available to the IU community and public and private stakeholders throughout Indiana and beyond the state.

The program builds upon existing UITS GIS services which are available to the IU community and general public at http://gis.iu.edu.

Funding for the project has come from a number of stakeholders, including the Indiana departments of Environmental Management and Natural Resources; and the United States Geological Survey. Major contributions came from a 2004 grant administered by what is now the Indiana Department of Homeland Security.

For additional information about the program and UITS, visit the Web site: http://uitsnews.iu.edu/index.html.