Twentieth birthday parties can sometimes be a rambunctious event, but they don’t usually feature people “nerding out” over maps and playing in sandboxes.
On Thursday, however, Metro’s Data Resource Center will break the mold at its annual subscriber’s meeting, celebrating the 20th year of publishing its Regional Land Information System (RLIS) -- a collection of regional geographic data that has informed many of the region’s most important projects over the last several decades.
Published as “RLIS Live”, the service offers subscribers access to more than 2 gigabytes of data in more than 140 different layers, ranging from tax lot boundaries to roads and watersheds to 20 years’ worth of aerial photographs. New updates to RLIS Live are released on a quarterly schedule, and since this month will mark the 80th such release, Data Resource Center staff are excited to celebrate such a major milestone.
The subscriber’s meeting, from 9 a.m. to noon Thursday at the Metro Regional Center, will offer current subscribers, Metro staff or any self-described geography nerds a chance to network and discuss the long-running service and the how they’ve put it to use over the years. DRC staff will be on hand to field questions and demonstrate tips and tricks for getting the most out of the data.
Opening the event will be several presentations by local geographers, educators and other RLIS-users, including Portland corporate GIS manager Matthew Freid, director of Portland State University’s GIS programs Geoffrey Duh, and Mark Friesen, a web designer/developer from The Oregonian.
Of course, no birthday party is complete without toys, especially when one happens to be an “augmented reality sandbox”. This unusual device reacts dynamically to any changes made to the sand’s topography, making it fall somewhere between learning tool and art installation. Metro senior transportation planner Matthew Hampton will be on hand to demo the sandbox and explain its workings.
Finally, a “State of the RLIS” presentation by Data Resource Center staff will present the recent improvements and changes made to the current version of RLIS Live, as well as those that are in the pipeline for future iterations. Attendees will also be introduced to the Data Resource Center’s all-new management team.
From its humble beginnings in 1988, when the initial dozen layers cost a user $15,000, to its modernform as a wide-ranging, digitally-distributed catalog brimming with information, RLIS Live has grown and changed with the region over the years.
Even in the age of Big Data, such a cohesive yet wide-ranging set of data is still unusual, according to Steve Erickson, principal GIS specialist at Metro.
“It’s hard to think of another region in the country where you can just walk into an office and get a region wide comprehensive GIS data set that is this complete,” Erickson said.
None of it would be possible without the contributions from the dozens of regional partners. Without the counties and cities providing their data, RLIS Live would not be at the forefront of modern geographic information systems, he said.
“After all, it is really their data -- we just stitch it all together,” he added.
Learn more about this event