It has been about a year and a half since ILGISA began working with the Office of the Illinois Statewide 9-1-1 Administrator on Illinois’s migration to Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1). Around this time last year, a group of ILGISA Members formed a committee to work alongside Cindy Barbera-Brelle (Statewide 9-1-1 Administrator) to develop the GIS Policy Document and Data Standards. This update will cover some of the accomplishments to date, as well as what is to come.
In the fall of 2018, the committee finalized the IL NG9-1-1 Data Standards and IL NG9-1-1 Governance Policy documents. In conjunction with the documents, there was a series of regional presentations across the state that provided information on the NG9-1-1 project as a whole, the role of GIS, and the documents that were created for the project. The presentation and the documents can all be accessed at the Illinois Statewide Administrator’s Project Website.
Towards the end of the 2018 calendar year, the committee released two additional resources. The first was an NG9-1-1 Readiness Checklist. The document provides data stewards with the process preparation, data creation, data validation, and delivery methodology. The document provided links to resources for specific tasks, as well as, contact resources per region for those that have questions or concerns. It is important to note that this is a living document and as the project progresses, more resources and processes will be added to provide data stewards an accurate path to success.
The second resource released by the committee was the IL NG9-1-1 Geodatabase Template. Inside this compressed folder you will find two different geodatabases, one with and one without the topology rules. Topology, while not available on all licensing levels, is a vital component to ensure the accuracy of call routing in an NG9-1-1 system. Each Geodatabase has feature datasets for the Required, Strongly Recommended, and Recommended project feature classes and alias tables. The geodatabase is preset with domains and values. Those domain values can be viewed in spreadsheets that are supplied alongside geodatabases in the compressed folder. An XML database schema is also provided if you wish to generate your own geodatabase and import the schema. Both of these resources can also be found on the Illinois Statewide Administrator’s Project Website.
In 2019, the committee has continued to work on the project. There have been a series of regional meetings to discuss the project with local data stewards and data maintainers across the state. These meetings have provided positive feedback to the committee and helped re-shape policy and data standards for the project. The committee has also set up a temporary data storage system and has begun the process of aggregating data for the project. This aggregation of Public Service Access Point (PSAP) boundaries provided our first look at the statewide data coverage as it stands today. As the project progresses, it will grow into a fully functional statewide GIS.
Later this year training will begin for data stewards and data maintainers across the State. The training will aim to familiarize everyone with the process and the data needed for the projects success. ILGISA is thankful for this opportunity and proud of how it’s helping the State and our industry move into the future through GIS. A statewide GIS initiative of this magnitude is very exciting for Illinois and we are hopeful that the project will lay the groundwork for many other GIS focused collaborations at a state level.

Eric Creighton
ILGISA President
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Edited by Thomas O'Malley
Outreach Committee Chair

As I ventured into the year being into President-Elect of ILGISA, I looked forward to observing the organization with a different purpose and an all-encompassing goal.  My omnipresence would ensure that going into the year of my Presidency I would have a thorough understanding of all things ILGISA.  Shortly after I began my tenure as President-Elect, I received a call that swiftly evolved my role into the President of ILGISA.  While the passage was unconventional, the support of the ILGISA Board and CM Services provided a fluid transition.  But most importantly, the reason for this transition was that our President, Justin Nettleton, had the opportunity to continue his career in San Diego, CA.  We thank Justin for his hard work and dedication to ILGISA and wish him and his family the brightest of futures.
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ILGISA has a busy year ahead, with Regional Meetings in full swing, several ad-hoc committee’s and initiatives that support the growth of GIS within the state, and the annual ILGISA conference this fall.   That change of an officer role set in motion a series of others.  Chad Sperry was appointed as the President-Elect by the board for the remainder of the calendar year.  Filling Chad’s position of Treasurer is Jason Verachtert.  That fulfillment left a ILGISA Board Member position vacant and was unanimously filled by the board with Seth Stark, the GIS Administrator for the City of Decatur, Illinois.  We are very pleased that Seth has accepted the role and are very excited for his contributions to come.   Many changes have occurred in these past months, nonetheless ILGISA’s focus and goal to advance GIS in the state of Illinois remains intact.

GIS Notes has been a staple of ILGISA since the summer of 2000, sometimes as an annual publication, sometimes biannually. If you know your ILGISA history, you will note that that was five years (or six depending on who you talk to) after the inception of the association. In fact, GIS Notes itself was a combination of two publications: the ILGISA Newsletter and Dr Dahlberg's Illinois Mapnotes - some of which are available on Google Books. In 1999, the Board surveyed the membership concerning publications and realized that there continued to remain a strong desire to focus on Case Studies and Training Articles for this new publication. ILGISA hired a managing editor for GIS Notes and intended that they would turn out at least three volumes a year! This never happened; but for the last 17 years, GIS professionals in Illinois have had a place to publish and discuss their mapping projects. 

This same focus will now continue on in the form of the ILGISA blog. Having evolved into the most relevant form of disseminating information, this blog will allow for easy linking to online applications and better resource collaboration.  We will continue to promote Illinois GIS projects in and around the state with particular emphasis on case studies from our membership and training articles. All of the same committee reports and messages from the president that you have come to love will still be published. We, as the outreach committee, intend to publish articles once a month at first, then more often as articles begin to backlog. The image on the right is a snip from the first GIS Notes and the result of the ILGISA Board's membership survey noted above. ​

I want to personally thank all of the GIS Notes editors from the last 17 years. And I will leave you with the same final paragraph from the original GIS Notes, co-edited by Don Luman and Larry Gunderson (with a slight modification at the beginning): ​​

-Micah Williamson Outreach Committee Chairman, on behalf of the entire committee