The Holy Grail of GIS in Alabama?

Virtual Alabama, a system for sharing homeland security data, serves as a model of success for other states to follow.

By Art Kalinski, GISP

One weekend a few years ago, like most good GIS professionals, I was randomly reviewing USGS topo maps for fun. No, I’m not that far gone; I was actually searching for a retirement location. I noticed a region of northeast Alabama that featured a large lake surrounded by good-sized foothills. My wife, Connie, and I drove out to Lake Guntersville and fell in love with the place.

The peninsular town of Guntersville, which was still fairly undiscovered at that time, reminded me a little of Newport, Rhode Island. Lake Guntersville was twice the size of the landlocked Lake Lanier near our home in Atlanta, not to mention uncrowded and always at full pool. It offered superb sailing, fishing, and navigable water to Knoxville, the Gulf of Mexico, and even up to Lake Michigan. We bought a place and finally moved there permanently in December.

Now Alabama is certainly not the first state that comes to mind when one mentions technology, but little did I know that 30 miles north of Guntersville, in Huntsville, that stereotype was being shattered. Alabama was working on a system to communicate and share data for homeland security, creating a model that other states are now emulating.

The effort was initiated by Governor Bob Riley, who was frustrated by the lack of information he experienced while trying to respond to Hurricanes Dennis and Katrina in 2005, as well as tornadoes in 2003 and 2007. He instructed Jim Walker, his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) director, to fix the problem. As a retired Army lieutenant colonel, Walker tackled the issue with the same determination that had served him so well on active duty. He formulated the concept for Virtual Alabama; then, for implementation, he turned to the technical talent that was prevalent in Huntsville at the research park, the Redstone Arsenal, and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.

For decades, at GIS conferences and in classrooms across the country, we’ve heard the ultimate dream repeated: GIS would become a universal data integrator; it would provide all users with a common operating picture while mining data from many different sources. Finding this holy grail of GIS has been an uphill struggle, with seekers achieving varying degrees of success.

Virtual Alabama is unique among the myriad of efforts to reach this goal — unique in both its approach and its results. The system was developed by Norven Goddard, the assistant director for science and technology of Alabama DHS, and Chris Johnson, the vice president of geospatial technologies for the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. Goddard is on loan to DHS from the Army Space and Missile Command’s Future Warfare Center, where he serves as assistant director for science and technology. His technical staff includes Amy Robison and Justin Novak.

Goddard researched and tested every possible GIS viewing system, some common and some less well known. His search of systems included ESRI, Intergraph, Google Earth, NASA’s World Wind, Falconview, Skyline, Battlescape, and others. Goddard had several criteria that he wanted to meet. The system had to be cheap, easy to use, robust, able to ingest all data formats (vector, raster, and tabular), scalable, capable of supporting many simultaneous users, and sustainable. The one system that floated to the top was Google Earth — Google Earth Enterprise, in particular. With Google Earth the system could ingest the primary GIS data sets built in ESRI or Intergraph environments, it could serve the data to many users, and it was simple to use. In addition, the system is secure using Google Earth Enterprise, since it doesn’t touch Google Earth.

It’s interesting to note that the Google Earth technology was originally created by a company called Keyhole, under contract to the CIA. Google bought the rights, but the “K” in KML still points back to the file format’s origins. Even more interesting is that the wheel has come full circle, with more than 21 states — and several federal agencies involved in homeland security — carefully reviewing the success of Virtual Alabama as an example of “best practices” and rediscovering the old Keyhole effort, enhanced by the people at Google and in Alabama.

The statewide data sets include all available county GIS data, such as political boundaries, roads, rivers, streams, lakes, highways, parcels, floodplains, etc.

The system has evolved into a very sophisticated spatial data integration and viewing system that is accessible by every state agency. In addition to the standard vector data (points, lines, and polygons), the system has been expanded to include ortho-imagery, scanned USGS topo maps, and now photo-realistic 3D models built from high-resolution oblique imagery.

An example of 3D models built from high-resolution oblique imagery. Image courtesy of PLW ModelWorks/Pictometry.

The system can be used to drill down through multiple data layers or view 3D fly-through models, and it can even show detailed CAD floor plans and building interiors created in SketchUp. The system can also show the effects of floods and display plume footprints from Cameo/Aloha.

Floodplain data displayed in Google Earth shows the scope of buildings affected by a potential flood.

Those of you who have tried to establish such a system may have already guessed that some of the toughest hurdles were institutional, not technical. Virtual Alabama couldn’t be a system that relied on creating all the data; the cost of doing that would have been a showstopper. Instead, if there was to be any chance of success, the data had to come from local sources. But with the prevailing attitudes toward data ownership, cost recovery, and people jealously guarding their data, any statewide system was going to be a challenge.

The Virtual Alabama team enlisted the aid of county sheriffs who, in Alabama, are the second-highest-ranking public officials in their counties. Since this was a homeland security issue, the sheriffs were very willing participants, and they had the clout to make it happen. Additionally, as the system was growing, no one wanted to be the only holdout county that wasn’t part of this “mutual aid” resource.

Being Google-based helped with quick learning and adoption, as many users had already learned the basics of Google Earth on their home computers. At first the GIS community felt threatened, because this was not a “true GIS,” and it was much too easy to use. After all, most GIS people felt that they were the gatekeepers of mapping.

Soon, however, the reality changed perceptions. The number of users viewing data and creating maps exploded, as did the demand for better and more up-to-date GIS data. The GIS shops found themselves doing the higher-level work of building, updating, analyzing, and serving GIS data, rather than just cranking out maps. Virtual Alabama started as a DHS effort, but its use has spread to 34 state agencies with about 2,200 users — most without GIS backgrounds.

Each county continues to create and maintain its own data. The updates or expanded data sets are uploaded to Virtual Alabama continuously. New capabilities are being added weekly, including the ability to inset and register photos of disaster locations taken from news or police helicopters. Another advantage of the system is that counties that may not have the resources to create their own sophisticated GIS can still benefit by using the ready-built system and available data as a starting point for their own operation.

Everyone wishes that Virtual Alabama was a fully fleshed-out system with the same level of detail for all data layers, but it’s not. It’s still a work in progress that now has momentum and a broad array of motivated individuals building data elements to expand and increase the level of detail. As non-GIS-trained users learn more, they want more, and are willing to help. For instance, firefighters who in the past created paper ledgers of data relating to buildings and their contents are now creating floorplan CAD files or SketchUp models.

These SketchUp models were built by local firefighters using Alabama orthoimagery.

Now here is the real shocker. Are you ready? The total cost of setting up Virtual Alabama was just $150,000.

As I’m writing this article, several southern states are recovering from a huge weather event that spawned many tornadoes and killed, at last count, 55 people. I know that Alabama DHS is making good use of Virtual Alabama to respond to the storm and aid recovery efforts.

Tornado-damaged buildings are visible in this image, which was taken from a police helicopter.

This does highlight the fact that these disasters know no political boundaries, and that “mutual aid” and “interoperability” are not just buzzwords. If your agency needs to have access to GIS data and to create a common operating picture, take a serious look at the success of Virtual Alabama. This is a critical — and practical — high-tech system from the home of real rocket scientists.