Interactive Mapper

The Oregon Water Resources Department's (OWRD) Interactive Mapper is one of its most-used tools for providing information about the agency's various programs including water rights, water availability modeling, well log information, and dams.

The application was developed in 1998 to expedite the review of water rights applications for the water rights application review team. When an application is submitted to the agency, the review team checks a list of 20 questions, which previously required searching through several different sets of paper maps and volumes of regulations. The Information Services staff created a prototype program using Visual Basic and MapObjects^®. Concerned with the costs and support issues associated with deploying it on multiple desktops, the staff changed its focus to creating a Web-based application that would be accessible to staff and the public.

The OWRD Interactive Mapper was launched in January 2000. It provided a set of commonly used base themes, water rights, and a drill-down tool for the application review team to use to answer most of the questions on its checklist. Many more themes have since been added including an image catalog of the state's 2,000 scanned quad maps and a 1994 collection of orthophoto quads. Other agency databases are linked to the Mapper such as a library of scanned documents that includes well log and water rights certificates and other large databases. Now, data searches that had previously been restricted to text queries could start with a map. For example, when a user zooms down to a public land survey section, a query of the section theme will produce a link to the well log database for the area, or the user can query the water availability unit theme and produce a report on the fly from that model. A peak flow estimation program has also been added to the site.

Use of the Interactive Mapper is growing, and OWRD is looking for new ways to efficiently portray and use the increasing volumes of data that it can deliver.