In 1996, big things happened both in and outside the Portland metropolitan region.
A Willamette Valley flood affected thousands of Oregonians from Corvallis to Portland. Kobe Bryant played his first NBA game. Bill Clinton was re-elected President.
And Metro’s Data Resource Center released its first version of the Regional Land Information System to the public.
Twenty years later, the center's staff celebrated that legacy and talked about the future of the service, now known as RLIS Live, at their annual subscriber’s meeting on Feb. 11 at Metro Regional Center.
In addition to birthday cake, the event provided an opportunity for RLIS Live users, creators and contributors a chance to see some creative ways the data has been put to use, meet the center's new leadership, and hear about the latest improvements to the data as well as some hints about where it’s heading.
Oh, and there was a sandbox for people to play in.
Over the past 20 years, RLIS data has been used by local municipalities, private firms, nonprofits and educational institutions. Representing the latter group, Professor Geoffrey Duh, director of geographic information science programs at Portland State University, talked to the nearly-filled council chambers about how the data from RLIS is intertwined with the school’s curriculum.
Not just geography students, but also those studying urban and regional planning, geology or hydrology depend on the detailed geographic and infrastructural information in RLIS Live, Duh said.
“RLIS provides a personal, intimate way for these students to interact with their city and region,” Duh said. “They can take a bus or bike route to school, and in minutes they are in front of a computer and looking at the data for that route, extracting information from it.”
Mark Friesen, a web designer and cartographer for The Oregonian, was on hand to show how RLIS Live data has been incorporated by the newspaper into interactive online story maps.
Originally trained as a journalist and page designer, Friesen published an interactive map on the newspaper’s website in September in conjunction with an article about the history of Measure 50. The map proved to be very popular with readers – the amount of traffic it generated nearly crashed the RLIS Live servers. The map also reflects the applications possible with RLIS data by users with little to no formal training in geographic information systems.
In the spirit of celebrating geographic innovation, Metro senior transportation planner and cartographer Matthew Hampton demonstrated his homemade “augmented reality sandbox”. Falling somewhere between educational instrument and artful plaything, the device works by projecting a topographic map (complete with flowing bodies of water) instantly onto whatever peaks and valleys a user sculpts into the sand.
To close out the event, attendees were introduced to the DRC’s new leadership staff, almost all of them hired within the last six months. Jeff Frkonja, recently hired as director of Metro’s Research Center, underscored the important role RLIS Live has and will continue to play in the day-to-day operations of Metro’s various departments.
“RLIS is at the foundational layer of everything we do here at the DRC,” Frkonja said. “The work that’s done here is all towards providing the framework to make informed, data-driven decisions that positively impact our region’s future.”
Robert Kirkman knows as much as anyone else how far RLIS has come in 20 years. Kirkman worked for the DRC in the mid-1990s and recently returned as its manger of enterprise services.
In that interval, many things have changed about the service: its original subscription cost of $15,000 ($23,113 in today's dollars) is now $480 per year. The original release included just over a dozen informational layers, compared to this year’s 144. And the list of active subscribers has grown to 240.
It’s that number and variety of RLIS Live subscribers that drew Kirkman’s attention.
“RLIS has been used by a whole range of people and groups, and that speaks to the versatility of the product,” Kirkman said, “a versatility that we are focused on maintaining and evolving as the market for this data grows.”
There are a variety of possibilities for future expansions of RLIS Live, Kirkman said, from the “appification” of the data to make it more usable by today’s digital startups, to incorporating the latest methods of crowdsourcing and citizen engagement in the creation of new geographic data.
What is certain, Kirkman believes, is in the overarching goal of RLIS Live for the next 20 years.
“Ultimately, the focus of this service will continue to be about turning data into information," he said.