In 1997, the agency hired Mike Liotta to develop a GIS to assist with its missions at all three levels. As a Louisiana State Military Department employee, Liotta's sole responsibility was to develop a robust GIS for comprehensive decision support.

"Initially, we focused on mapping solutions for managing our military properties," says Liotta. "But as the state missions became more frequent, we had to look at mapping on a much larger scale."

The daily job of the GIS section is to help LANG administer its property, assets and field deployments. The section manages spatial data related to infrastructure, assets and personnel, as well as producing field maps for training purposes. During emergency operations, its mission broadens to encompass the entire state.

Louisiana has been proactive in deploying GIS and collecting data. A network of state and local government GIS departments has captured, maintained and shared data for years, resulting in a large volume of imagery, elevation data, vector data and other spatial layers throughout the state. As the state has responded to several large-scale emergency situations in recent years, the need for quick access to existing imagery—as well as the need to efficiently process new imagery—has grown significantly.

As one of the many GIS users within the state GIS community, Liotta got word of a new server GIS platform that was available.

"ESRI was just beginning to put out literature on the image extension, and that is when it all came together," explains Liotta. "We had a 14TB storage area network. It was 70 percent raster data that was just waiting to get accessed by our users."
 

With the decision to implement the ArcGIS Server Image extension, Liotta and other staff members worked to build an accurate needs assessment. He approached staff members in the Joint Operations Center, which coordinates LANG emergency operations, and aviation units, which conduct the emergency aerial operations, to see what tools would improve their efficiency in emergency response.

The LANG GIS section teamed with ESRI business partner Geographic Information Services (www.gis-services.com), Birmingham, Ala., to carry out implementation and application development services.

From Hours to Minutes
In October 2008, LANG implemented ArcGIS Server 9.3 and the image extension. Immediately, raster datasets that had been deemed unusable because of their size became useful.

For example, LANG had more than 200GB of newly acquired, six-inch digital imagery for its installations. With the image extension in place, it took just 30 minutes to turn the raw data into a readily available image service with which a user could type a few keystrokes to get the image needed.

"We can quickly make changes, add or update map and image services, and provide the same view to both Web and ArcGIS Desktop users," says Liotta.
 

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