The agency that manages these resources is the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), with responsibilities encompassing water quality, flood control, natural systems, and water supply for its customers in South Florida. As might be expected, the District manages many major projects, each requiring that vast amounts of information related to drainage basins, monitoring stations, water control structures, and water bodies be interrelated and shared.

Recognizing the need for a better means of data integration, and to correct data fragmentation issues, the District decided to fast-track development of its planned Enterprise GIS system. Real-world data from key flood control, natural system restoration, operations decision support, and regional modeling projects is being used to populate aprototype enterprise database erected using the Arc Hydro framework.

Working as a team, PBS&J, District staff, and the University of Texas’ Center for Research in Water Resources (CRWR), developed a system framework that addresses common data needs, common functional needs, and data sharing opportunities. The conceptual framework has been implemented as an ESRI geodatabase design, and exported to a personal geodatabase for testing. The geodatabase and a toolbox to load, manage, and use the data will be executed in the Enterprise GIS under ArcGIS Version 9.0 and take advantage of model builder. The GIS tools are being developed to help build, maintain, and utilize the geodatabase as a shared resource at the District.

Future efforts will focus on using the common data framework within project-specific settings, but even these project-specific situations will link back to the original data model.