Melissa Crane, the San Juan County Geographic Information Systems (GIS ) Program Coordinator, recently announced that additional Polaris training will take place on on Orcas Island on Tuesday, September 8 at 1:30 pm at the Orcas Senior Center.
The GIS Team has designed Polaris to become the one-stop-shop for both County staff and the public to obtain information from various County departments and other agencies.
The first interactive map to be released is called Polaris Express and is meant to be the fastest and easiest of the Polaris maps.
Polaris Express contains the following data layers:
- June 2008 aerial photographs
- Legal parcels and tax parcels
- Buildings (addresses)
- Driveways
- Roads
- Lakes
- Ferry routes and terminals
- Digital elevation model and hillshade
Other interactive mapping applications planned for future release include habitats; land use and environmental health (wells, septic systems, etc.); public lands and trails; election boundaries; hydrography and unstable slopes; and emergency response information (i.e. evacuation routes, helicopter landing zones, etc).
At the Sept. 8 session, the public can learn how to:
— Mark up your map with text and drawing tools
— Email a map to your friend
— Obtain information and parcels and addresses, such as ownership, acreage, and assessed value
— Measure areas and distances in a variety of units
— Obtain the X,Y coordinates of a particular location
Upcoming Polaris applications and functions that will be coming in the near future will also be discussed.
All sessions are free and open to the public. For further information, call Crane at 370-0542.
Polaris is accessible at https://www.sjcgis.org/ or by clicking on “Polaris Mapping Application” on the County website.
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