For the 1997 ESRI User Conference, I am going to present a 1/2 day hydrology seminar. I'm going to prepare a CD-ROM for distribution at that seminar which will be manufactured by ESRI and most likely 1000 copies will be made. Obviously, this is a good way for us to show what we have been doing in our research program and I'd like to do a good job in preparing that. I want to have a beta of the ROM prepared by May 15 for testing. I have to deliver the final version by June 2.

I think the ROM will include the following components:

(1) Educational exercises like the ones we've been doing in class. These will be in a folder that I'll call exercise and will be labelled ex1, ex2, etc. There is no particular limit on the number of exercises that could be included. Each exercise will have two directories: a webfiles directory that contains the html and .gif or .jpg files that the exercise needs and a gisfiles directory that contains all the gisfiles that the exercise needs.

If the exercise needs the user to execute an Arcview project, I'd like the project .apr file pathed out relative to the files in its own directory so that the user can execute the .apr file without having to copy it from the ROM or to repath it. To relatively path an .apr file you must have the files that it calls in the same directory as the .apr file or in one directory below (such as files for a coverage whose coverage name is a directory in the same directory as the .apr file. Use the Accessories/Notepad Replace command to delete all the front end stuff that absolutly paths the address. For example, if you path is z:/home1/maidment/exercise/austin.shp and your .apr file is in z:/home1/maidment/exercise/proj.apr, then if you do a global replace of z:/home1/maidment/exercise (replaced with a blank), then your .apr file will refer to the austin.shp file simply as austin.shp and your proj.apr file in this directory will pick up austin.shp also in this directory. This idea of relative pathing means that all the files that a project needs are carried along with the project as local files on a ROM and thus the ROM is a really secure and complete object.

(2) GIS Hydrology models like our soil water, surface water, water quality and terrain analysis models. I am thinking of calling these by the acronym GH, as in GH-Soil (Soil Water Balance), GH-Terrain (for terrain analysis), GH-Surface (for surface water flow), etc.GH stands for GIS Hydrology. For a model to make it onto the ROM it needs to have:

(a) A working set of code complete with a user example

(b) Definition of what input data the model needs and what output data it produces.

(c) Documentation as to how the model works and what is inside of it.

(d) An exercise which leads the user through the application of the model.

(e) An email address of the person who will respond to queries about this model. You have to back up what you put out there for people to use.

If you have components of your research that you think could meet these criteria, please let me know.

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