The project s long history is a saga of budget snafus, missed opportunities, changing procurement strategies and disputes over technical and architectural matters. As far back as 1987, according to an official history of the project, a prototype demonstration found significant problems with data consistency and accuracy in BLM s older systems. The testers encountered conflicts and mismatches when they imported old data into the prototype of the new system. Difficulties in marrying up data from disparate systems are one of the reasons GIS technology has not been adopted at the vigorous rate that analysts and marketeers had predicted. Today, however, data warehousing technologies are available to pull information from various sources so that common elements can be identified and logical connections made.
Location often is one of the common data elements that link the data sets.
Meanwhile, mainstream database software packages, such as those offered by Informix Corp. and Oracle Corp., are more able to handle location as an extra dimension of data. Specialized software may not be mandatory for many applications. It s common now to display geographic data with a World Wide Web browser and click on map spots to drill down for more data. There were other reasons why GIS was slow to take off. It requires powerful computers to process data and display maps.