NWGIS 2018 Conference

Tracking your GIS data assets as a GIS person can be a convoluted process. Data is being viewed and utilized through many different applications, such as web maps, mobile maps, and desktop applications. Being able to identify all the data layers supporting an ArcGIS Online Web App and then tracing that back to the source can be a valuable thing to know. Also when you are doing data updates and need to know what web/mobile maps this data update will effect can be very important. Innovate developed a custom application called the Data Management Tool (DMT) to improve the quality, consistency, and transparency of US EPA Region 9 geospatial resources. As background, the US EPA Region 9 utilizes a wide range of Esri products in multiple internal, sensitive, and public environments. Maintaining an up to date and accurate inventory of data in enterprise geodatabases, ArcGIS Server services, and ArcGIS Online items is both arduous and complex. Further, a historical focus on project-centric operations tended to silo data by project area or support division, often resulting in data and metadata replication. While EPA Region 9 has deployed previous data management systems, their faults were often in the reliance of manual inventory updates and user input. The DMT application provides a searchable, sortable, user-friendly interface that not only relates all of the content but checks for the existence of and completeness of related documentation, including hosting environment, metadata, unique identifiers, update cycles, and sharing settings. The application serves as a live, single point of entry for all analysts to find resources, and immediately identify their location, accuracy, and relevance. The new DMT leverages the backends of enterprise geodatabases in Microsoft SQL Server, ArcGIS for Server, and the ArcGIS Online API to harvest and relate features in all three Esri products. The system is deployed in each environment and automatically harvests items in the enterprise geodatabases and those related to map service layers, including the metadata for all ArcGIS Online items to identify if any contain rest services.