KGS releases new water, oil and gas interactive mappers

LAWRENCE — The Kansas Geological Survey has released new versions of its online Oil and Gas and Water Well (WWC5) mappers, which allow users to spatially interact with Kansas oil, gas, and water well data along with other complementary data for exploring Kansas’s underground resources. The mappers are used for visualizing wells and researching data about the wells to enhance understanding of patterns and trends.

The new mappers reside in a platform called ArcGIS Online, the cloud offering of GIS software company Esri. Although the new versions of the mappers sit on a new platform, the functionality of the mappers remains the same. Experienced users will be able to perform functions similar to those they performed before. In addition, the mappers offer enhanced query and table-viewing capabilities.

With the new mappers, users who have ArcGIS Online accounts can export data as items in their own accounts. There are also additional links to the KGS GIS Data and Maps site, where users can explore and download KGS GIS data for their own use.

Kristen Jordan Koenig, GIS Developer for the KGS, has been working on the new mapper versions for the last two years. This effort involved migrating data into ArcGIS Online, streamlining workflows for daily data updates, and building the two applications from scratch in Experience Builder.

The old versions of the mappers functioned well for the KGS for more than 10 years, but the aging technology and facility infrastructure behind the mappers meant they were no longer capable of supporting the performance and reliability that users have come to expect with modern web applications. These factors, combined with rising software costs, led the KGS to leverage Esri’s cloud GIS platform.

“Change is difficult, particularly when users haven’t experienced inconveniences with an existing system,” Koenig said. “However, this update modernizes the back-end technology of the mappers by a decade. We at the KGS strive to provide our users with consistent access to data in easily usable formats, and the new mappers allow us to continue to do that.”

Learn more about the new mappers in this KGS YouTube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS6P1tz7I58