ORLANDO, Fla.—In the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has charged the Department of Homeland Security with carrying out three federal strategic mandates:
Enable seamless communication among all responders.
In the example of a terrorist attack or other disaster, that means gathering together geographic information from many sources—some in proprietary formats such as maps, 3-D terrain models, aerial photography and the like—as quickly as possible to enable a meaningful response. Then it needs to be delivered into the hands of first responders (police, fire, EMS, military), who have a need to use the data in a way they can access quickly on their computers.
PDF is helping to enable that, as Layton Graphics showed Tuesday at the Adobe Acrobat & PDF Conference here. The company demonstrated its Map2PDF software, which collects information from GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and publishes it to PDF documents that can be used by responders who might have access only to Adobe Reader.
The technology is already being used by U.S. soldiers in Iraq to distribute mapping information to Iraqi soldiers, said Andy Skillen, the company's national account manager. The Iraqi soldiers have access to Reader but don't have the proprietary systems their American counterparts do, which can include "dozens of file formats that just aren't available on any normal computer."
Layton also makes a free Reader plug-in that allows users reading these "geoPDFs" to interact with GPS devices and figure out where they are located and where they're going.
Military users represent power-using early adopters; many U.S. local governments are just beginning to collect data on their own areas, building GIS databases that start with tax maps. They later add more complex detail—collected from heterogeneous data systems involving many different file formats, most of which can be converted easily to PDF.
"Being able to send someone one PDF that contains all the mapping information is a very clean distribution method," Skillen said, adding that first responders can quickly open and use the files.
Skillen showed how all of the above-mentioned data can be collected from GIS systems and output to a PDF map of Cobb County, Ga. His file included terrain maps, showed buildings and was accompanied by hazard information specific to an area, such as how to handle chemical spills or gas leaks.
But some GIS professionals think PDF is a "dumb image format for an 8-by-11 page," Skillen said, providing a hurdle for those who advocate PDF as a standard for this application.
Getting around that can be tough, he said, but his company has been able to show PDF's seaworthiness by assigning different levels of data to separate layers in a file and turning each layer on and off.
He also demonstrated how the 6,400 percent zoom of a satellite picture in Adobe Reader can clearly zoom in close enough to show pedestrians walking down the street.
All of these technical features help sway naysayers in the GIS community who can't believe that such robust features—including PDF search—can be access for no charge in Reader.
"The GIS people are not used to getting all that for free," Skillen said. "These intelligent PDFs give you all the complexity you can get with a more complex viewer, and we can really start getting this information into the hands of [first responders] right away."
Content Management 
