Beacon Resources' Georgia Points program, simply put, implements an intelligent GIS interface to Excel.  The objective of this program is to assist State Regulatory Agencies in better managing their point-oriented assets and resources.  These point-oriented inventories can include items such as environmental cleanup sites, power plants, emergency operations centers, supply depots, harbors, navigation structures, waste disposal sites, bridges, dams, or any other point-oriented spatial feature.

This program utilizes built-in off-the-shelf graphic backgrounds consisting of State outlines, and Regional/District outlines for the following Georgia Agencies and Regions:

Some of these graphic backgrounds are illustrated below:

Feature/Inventory information comes from Excel files, which are easily imported into an internal Access Database.  An imported inventory can consist of any number of records and up to 240 fields per record.  Effectively, the user designs the database structure using the first line of the Excel file, which consists of the field names for each of the imported records.

An important new capability of the GeorgiaPoints program is that multiple imported sets of data can reside within the program's internal database simultaneously.  This means that the display interfaces, export capabilities, and reporting tools can be used for multiple sets of data such as the Georgia Safedams program own inventory of dams, the Georgia information from the National Inventory of Dams, and information about Georgia other spatial data features such as waste disposal sites or drilling permit sites.

An Easy-to-use and powerful searching interface is available for finding and displaying data from the inventory of imported features.  All imported fields can be searched.  A search criteria can consist of up to 12 terms which utilize the equals, like, greater than, and less than operators.  The search criteria terms are logically linked using selectable "and"/"or" operators.  Wildcard searches are permitted.

A symbol and color-coding interface is available for displaying search results that meet the query criteria.  The color-coding and symbol-coding can be independent of one another or both can be combined.  For example, you could use color coding to indicate hazard potential, and symbol coding to indicate whether the feature has an emergency action plan.  As shown below, Search results can be shown graphically or tabularly.

Search results can be exported graphically to Powerpoint or Word, they can be used to generate pertinent data sheets in Word, subsets of the data can be exported to Excel spreadsheets, or the data can be exported to Google Earth as a .kml file, automatically generated by the program.  The export to Google capability is particularly useful for verifying the locations of assets and also for displaying current real-time weather overlays.

The Georgia Points program, with baseline background graphics, is available from Beacon Resources for USD $500.  Baseline graphics include the State outline and the individual outlines of the Counties in the State.  Additional graphics are implemented at extra cost depending upon the complexity of the graphics.  Agency/District boundaries that fall along county boundaries are less expensive to implement.  Implementing River Basin boundaries requires more custom digitization and is therefore more expensive to implement.  Please contact Michael Grounds at (256) 771-0014 for additional information or if you have any questions.