SSMC Faculty
Bernard Engel (right)

CAAGIS (http://danpatch.ecn.purdue.edu/~caagis/) was founded in 1998 to apply GIS tools in inter-disciplinary education, outreach and research efforts, both for Purdue University and for Indiana municipalities. The creation of a Center for Advanced Applications of Geographic Information Systems (CAAGIS) was proposed to Purdue's Academic Re-investment Program in order to build on past campus successes such as INGIS and WETnet. Resources and databases maintained by CAAGIS, such as the complete Indiana aerial photo and topographic map sets, enhance our ability to address local needs with detailed information. Data layers are provided on our local network, and as a digital data library and for Internet / FTP download.

CAAGIS provides free download of Indiana GIS data, full coverage of Indiana aerial photos (1998 1 meter USGS), and full coverage of Indiana USGS topographic maps at this website: http://danpatch.ecn.purdue.edu/~caagis/ftp/gisdata/data.html

CAAGIS is self-supporting and welcomes the opportunity to cooperate in grant-funded projects. Our most exciting current project is the Indiana GIS atlas (available this fall on DVD, CD-ROM, by FTP, or on external hard drive. This project has produced a 92-disk set of CD-ROMs for the counties of Indiana. Data are in shapefile, tif and sid image formats. This means
that a free browser program like ArcExplorer is all that is needed to view the entire contents. Data layers for each county include USGS layers such as aerial photos, topographic maps, NLCD landuse, NASS cropuse, and (14, 11 and 8 digit) watersheds. Each county also includes Census 2000 layers such as roads, rails, townships, census tracts, zip codes. Many other layers are included, and each county averages 350 megabytes of data. The data set is available for free on FTP right now and will be available on various media later this fall.

Bernard Engel

Professor
Agricultural & Biological Engineering
ABE - Room 309
765-494-1198
Email: engelb@ecn.purdue.edu
Internet: http://pasture.ecn.purdue.edu/~caagis