Army Corps of Engineers and the USGS announce a collaborative effort for sharing Geospatial data.

SANZ Inc. (OTCBB:SANZ) Geospatial Solutions Group, a provider of spatial data provisioning solutions, has announced the completion of the implementation of its EarthWhere Spatial Data Provisioning software for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)--Albuquerque District, Albuquerque, N.M. By enabling access to vital imagery datasets, this implementation will facilitate inter-agency collaboration between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Rocky Mountain Mapping Center, as well as a number of other partners (including federal, state, county, city, university, and tribal agencies).

Collectively these organizations have jurisdictional responsibilities for planning and implementing restoration-oriented projects in the Rio Grande valley in Albuquerque. The primary focus of this joint data provisioning effort is a series of multi-agency projects situated in the riparian woodland area of the Rio Grande (or "Bosque"). EarthWhere's use through an interagency agreement between USACE and USGS provides a method for hosting project datasets at the USGS's Rocky Mountain Mapping Center in Denver.

Project data is housed at the USGS Rocky Mountain Mapping Center and is accessed by each of the stakeholders using the EarthWhere Web-based interface. The collaboration between USGS and USACE highlights efforts underway by several agencies in the federal government to share existing assets and expertise in geotechnology. The USGS is providing the hosting infrastructure along with access to digital aerial and satellite imagery sets unique to the Bosque study area, as well as their archived geospatial datasets of over 30 terabytes (TBs) of imagery. The EarthWhere system provides USACE and its stakeholders with immediate access to critical data over the Internet. Rocky Mountain Mapping Center's system has been operational since January 2003.

"The implementation of EarthWhere and the hosting of data at the USGS Rocky Mountain Mapping Center (RMMC) will give all of our stakeholders rapid access to existing datasets--something that we could not accomplish for a variety of reasons. The ability to leverage the National Map data from the USGS and provide this to our stakeholders adds immense value to the project and was a great example of how U.S. federal agencies can collaborate and share both expertise and data assets," said Dr. Clay Mathers, Geospatial Coordinator, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Albuquerque District. "EarthWhere provides a framework that allows a diverse community to collaborate with standardized datasets but still meet the individual needs of each stakeholder."