Saudi Water Net – A Pilot Study for Making Water Resources Data Internet-GIS Available

Data describing water resources of Saudi Arabia is huge and scattered among various sources and in different electronic formats as well as hard copy reports. In addition, the data contained in the electronic formats such as MS Excel spreadsheets and MS Word documents are not readily available for use and interpretation, not to mention the difficulty to widely distribute them. A pilot study was conducted with two main objectives; first, to integrate various Saudi water resources data into four categories, namely surface water, groundwater, desalinated sea water, and reclaimed wastewater; second, to make this data available for as many users as possible. ArcGIS is used to build a Geodatabase that contains layers of information of the four categories. Then, ArcIMS was used to publish shapefiles version of the Geodatabase feature classes on the Local Area Network. The information posted in the Intranet site is just the start while updating and recruiting new data is going on. The data providers are the Ministry of Water and Electricity and published literature