The Polis Center has a core staff, adjunct faculty, and student interns to enhance the use of GIS for decision support activities. Within the last 5 years, GIS, has emerged as a technology for local governments and utilities to manage infrastructure. Business communities have also embraced this technology to help analyze markets and clients and support development decisions. GIS has also emerged as a robust tool to support specialized analyses such as damage assessments from flooding and earthquakes. And finally GIS has become a mainstream technology with Google Maps, and Microsoft Virtual Earth. The GIS decision support staff have collaborated on multiple initiatives to advance this technology. Specific project profiles are included on separate web pages. A summary of activities supporting the engagement and research activities is included below.

The GIS professionals have assisted both small and large organizations to implement GIS technology. The collaborations have included providing basic education, “GIS for Dummies” to organizations considering the use of this technology. The second phase of this process has typically involved performing a requirements analysis to understand the organization’s business processes and data flows. The results of the analyses are compiled into a strategic implementation plan. Finally the university collaboration has supported the implementation of GIS in these organizations. The Polis team have worked closely with the private sector GIS vendor community to implement best practices.

The availability of Google Maps, Google Earth, Microsoft's TeraServer, Yahoo! Maps and similar systems has enabled enthusiasts and part time developers to make highly interactive Web interfaces to these companies’ services. Local communities also use GIS websites to provide property and infrastructure information to staff and the public. There are currently limitations for integrating data from these multiple services into a unified view. The Polis Center in collaboration with the Indiana University Grid Computing lab continues to pursue several research initiatives to integrate local GIS services, and other web data services, with Google and similar systems broader coverage into a single system. These initiatives present both an interesting computer science challenge as well as provide potential benefits to multi jurisdictional activities such as emergency management and economic development which rely on a seamless view of this composite information.

The staggering increases in natural disaster costs identified in the previous figure lead to the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000. The Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 requires communities to develop and maintain a risk management plan in order to be eligible for federal disaster funds. A critical FEMA developed tool for analyzing these risks to meet this objective is HAZUS-MH.

Polis assists federal, state, local governments to help them identify and quantify the impacts of natural and manmade hazard scenarios. The grants and contracts are collaborations with universities, private sector engineers, regional planning commissions, and state and Federal agencies. Polis works with these organizations to develop Hazard Risk Assessment capacity, provide HAZUS-MH technology knowledge transfer, and develop HAZUS-MH modeling best practices

The Polis Center is actively involved with both central Indiana and statewide collaborations to advance geospatial technologies. On February 24, 2005, representatives of six of Indiana’s seven state funded institutions of higher education came together and drafted a Memorandum of Understanding which was later signed by all the participants. The Polis Center is the current convening partner of the Coalition of Universities for Spatial Information Sciences (CUSIS). These institutions agreed to participate in a coalition of state universities to coordinate and promote geographic information science with a support focus on the traditional threefold mission of universities: education, research and service.

The Polis Center is also working with the Indiana Silver Jackets state hazard mitigation group that includes Indiana Department Homeland Security, the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, the National Weather Service, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, US Geological Survey to advance the GIS research and analyses to help mitigate flood disasters. Polis is also active with the Indiana Geographic Information Council (IGIC) to support statewide GIS education.

In concert with the SAVI Central Indiana initiative, the Polis Center is an active participant and board member with the Indianapolis Mapping and geographic Information System (IMAGIS) to support regional GIS data sharing and collaboration. Polis also provides GIS support to the Metropolitan Indianapolis Board of Realtors (MIBOR)