The Northern Kentucky Area Planning Commission (NKAPC) is Kentucky's sole recipient of the 2005 Special Achievement in GIS award for LINK-GIS' efforts in fostering regional cooperation. LINK-GIS, a leading Northern Kentucky geographic information system, has become a leader in creating a uniformed standard for GIS databases in their three-county region of Kenton, Campbell and Pendleton. LINK-GIS will receive the award on NKAPC's behalf at the Twenty-fifth Annual Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) International User Conference in San Diego, California, on July 27th. Winners of this award were selected from more than 150,000 organizations worldwide. ESRI gives the Special Achievement in GIS Award to one organization in each state that has made extraordinary contributions to our global society and set new precedents throughout the GIS (geographic information system) community. "The organizations winning this award have used GIS to produce profound work that benefits their businesses as well as the world around them," said Jack Dangermond, ESRI president. "They deserve to be recognized for the dedication and diligence apparent through their work with GIS." The problem that Kentucky and a number of other states face is there isn't a uniform code for geographic information used by the numerous GIS database administrators. To reconcile that for their three-county region, LINK-GIS set out to create a platform whereby any organization or government entity accessing data from the three counties would know that from one county to the next, the data would be structured the same. "When government agencies, planners, or development professionals work on regional projects it is imperative that they are using the most accurate information possible," explains Trisha Brush, LINK-GIS' Deputy Director for GIS Administration, a division of Northern Kentucky Area Planning Commission. "By working with numerous stakeholders in the community, we've been able to make the system easy for everyone." Earlier this year, LINK-GIS became a 2005 recipient of Kentucky's EQC Earth Day Award for their work compiling a brownfields inventory and database for Kenton County that includes 229 identifiable brownfield locations. Because of their efforts, other municipalities are now using this model statewide. Recently, LINK-GIS made more than 320 square miles of color digital aerial photography available via www.linkgis.org. The project catalogs 110,721 buildings, 1,466 miles of road, and more than 207,000 acres in Northern Kentucky.

Source: NKAPC, July 25, 205