Iowa Department of Transportation
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GIS and Spatial Technologies

About Iowa DOT's GIS

GIS Software In spring 2005, Iowa DOT made a change to the department's GIS staffing roles and responsibilities and the GIS coordinator was hired to fill the new coordinator position and given the responsibility for Spatial and GIS Coordination at Iowa DOT.

Each Iowa DOT office can implement GIS technologies and request assistance from the spatial and GIS coordination group. If offices' spatial data will be used across the Iowa DOT enterprise, data must reside in an Oracle® Spatial environment. If offices; spatial data is only used in within its office, data can reside in many formats (shape, Access, Excel, text, etc.). We recommend Iowa DOT offices use GIS software that can natively connect to Oracle® Spatial, Iowa DOT's GIS software of choice is GeoMedia.

Iowa DOT’s GIS responsibility infrastructure is based on a federated model. Iowa DOT’s Spatial and GIS coordination group coordinates GIS technologies but has no authority to sign contracts or issue a request for proposal. Each office wanting to RFP a GIS/spatial project will work with the spatial and GIS Coordination Group. Spatial and GIS coordination staff will ensure proper technologies and technical resources exist for a successful project. Each office with GIS is responsible for a GIS business analyst; this person supports day-to-day analysis and report creation.

Iowa DOT has invested in GIS and spatial technologies and staff. Currently the Information Technology Division has three full time staff dedicated to this mission. The Office of Transportation Data, led by Peggi Knight, is a leader in using GIS technologies for transportation inventories and map creation. Transportation Data also is responsible for linear referencing system (LRS) and geographic information management systems (GIMS) funding as well as LRS business data maintenance. A statewide set of imagery and multiple enterprise base layers ranging from road centerlines to heliport locations are available to Iowa DOT staff. Production linear referencing system can be used for location of features along roadways and soon rail lines. Multiple layers can be downloaded from the Iowa DOT's GIS Web site.

GIS technologies used

  • 59 seats of GeoMedia
  • 29 seats of GeoMedia Pro
  • one GeoMedia transportation
  • one GeoMedia grid
  • one TerraShare enterprise license
  • 80 TerraShare client licenses
  • one 1 GeoMedia WebMap Professional
  • three Oracle Spatial database servers multiple SQL server and Oracle servers for business data
  • three ArcGIS
  • 7 ArcInfo
  • two Bentley LRSx component
  • 10 GeoMedia transaction manager
  • Multiple Google® Earth installations