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MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. – Geographic Information Systems, better known as GIS, is releasing interactive Marine Corps Birthday products about Medal of Honor recipients, movies and history, Nov. 13, in honor of the Marine Corps Birthday and GIS Day.
The three new products include "Significant Engagements of the U.S. Marine Corps" which presents a chronological and geographic history of significant engagements in which the Marine Corps played a major role; "Medal of Honor Recipients" which provides a complete list of all U.S. Marines who have received the Medal of Honor by state or country of birth; and "Marines on Screen" which highlights some of the cinematic portrayals of the U.S. Marine Corps and where they took place.
“Our job is developing spatial data and mapping products to display that data, so people can learn about their environment and make decisions about policy and development,” said Scot Miller, the regional leading manager for the Marine Corps Installations East GIS team. “The regional group here, helps them do it efficiently, makes sure that they have all the tools that they need on hand and we also have technical knowledge.”
According to Miller, GIS is a map of data with details like dates, times and events attached to locations on a map. Each installation has a massive amount of information they are tracking.
“A lot of (requests have) historically been, ‘print me a map and bring it into a meeting,’ and (the products we produce) have enough information so they can make a decision with it,” said Miller. “But we’re starting to move towards these web-based interactive tools, where it’s not just what’s printed; you can dig deeper into the layers of what’s going on with just a click of a mouse.”
According to Miller, there used to be some prior skill-set required just to use GIS, but now the program is much more user friendly. Now anyone with a CAC card and a login can access the portal, and create their own maps or stories.
“You don’t have to know much other than how to browse on the web,” said Miller. “Anybody that has a browser can navigate to them and find out the information that we’re trying to share.”
Coincidentally, GIS Day falls a few days after the Marine Corps Birthday, Nov. 10, explained Miller, and to celebrate both events they have created maps to demonstrate the GIS capability and hopefully inspire Marines to use GIS in their own military specialties.
One example, built by Andrew Potter, a GIS analyst, took the 209 Medal of Honor recipients from the Marine Corps and separated them into each conflict and organized them geographically on a map, and each geographical location on the map includes the citation about how that Marine earned that award as well as an image.
“Here I can pull up three recipients from Kansas, so it includes data on multiple levels,” said Potter. “You can spend a lot of time clicking through, but this is an interesting map where you can teach someone about something in particular.”
Potter explained that GIS can also translate to the business side of things, like creating a map of Camp Lejeune to include building numbers and these kinds of maps will be available to anyone with a CAC card and or login.
“The amount of work that goes into creating a paper map product is a lot and then every time you go to change it, it’s a lot more work,” said Potter. “The good thing about these kinds of web-based applications is that you can put the data in, and then let the data drive itself. You can interact with it, and you can get more information about this point.”
For more information about products on the GEOFidelis Portal visit https://www. geofidelis.usmc.mil/portalprod/home or how to request an account should be directed to mcieast_igis_omb@usmc.mil.
| Date Taken: | 11.05.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 11.06.2018 13:09 |
| Story ID: | 298966 |
| Location: | CAMP LEJEUNE, NORTH CAROLINA, US |
| Web Views: | 58 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
This work, Mapmakers feature Corps history to promote web-based capabilities, by Sgt Breanna Weisenberger, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
