Presentations from the
7th Annual OFWIM Conference
Baltimore, Maryland
November 1st-5th, 2002

The MARIS Partnership: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (Sobaski/Loftus - IDNR/CMI)

For the past eight years, several federal and state agencies have been collaborating to implement a distributed database system for sharing state-based aquatic species information. The resulting Multi-State Aquatic Resources Information System (MARIS) allows users to access quantitative information on aquatic species from multiple states through an Internet- based query system. Providers of the data (states) maintain the control over, and integrity of, their internal data systems while allowing a single point of access for end users. A prototype of the full working model for lake-based data has been implemented and initial evaluations of the data have demonstrated this system's applicability to answering research questions requiring multi-state data. The conceptual model for a component to handle stream-based data has been developed and will be implemented in 2002-2003. Over the course of development , several technical, administrative, and political challenges have been encountered, some of which have successfully been addressed and some of which remain. Lesson learned from these challenges will be discussed, which can be very instructive to the future development of MARIS and to similar interagency information sharing efforts.

Visit the MARIS Web-site at: http://www.gis.uiuc.edu/maris/

This presentation available as:
PowerPoint presentation (Sobaski/Loftus): MARIS (PPT)
Adobe Acrobat Reader file (Sobaski/Loftus): MARIS (PDF)