CAST Fiscal Year 2004-2005 Annual Report - Center for Advanced ...

Public
Service
CAST staff members are regularly involved in a
variety of activities that directly and indirectly
benefit Arkansans, from its work with Arkansas'
high school students who participate in the
EAST Initiative to making geographic
information data easily available to the general
public through the CAST website and the
GeoStor data warehouse.
CAST staff members respond to hundreds of
requests for assistance or demonstrations each
year from sources ranging from University of
Arkansas students to rural 4H clubs. CAST's
public service mission includes talks,
demonstrations, workshops, meetings,
presentations, and responses to requests for a
variety of types of information. Some of CAST's
major public service efforts for FY 04-05 are
described below.
Cast’s new webpage: www.cast.uark.edu
CAST’S WEBSITE.
Established in 1994, CAST’s website
(www.cast.uark.edu) was designed to provide
access to maps and spatial data, to provide
information on the Center's research projects,
and serve as an informational resource in the
areas of GIS, remote sensing, photogrammetry,
spatial technologies, historic preservation, and
archaeology. This award-winning site was
developed and designed by Snow L. Winters.
With its recent update, CAST’s website better
reflects the variety of the Center’s activities and
provide easy access to frequently requested
data. CAST’s goal to introduce and provide GIS
technologies to the widest audience possible
continues to drive the development of this
website.
The Center's website continues to expand in the
quality and quantity of data it contains and in the
ease of access to that data. While most website
accesses come from the U.S., the site is utilized
by students, the public, and researchers from
around the world. The CAST website has an
average of 32,000 hits per day. This number
has remained consistently high since its
dramatic rise in 2002 from 19,000.
Along with the high number of hits for the
website, the number of other sites with links to
CAST has risen. Currently there are 24,765
other websites that link to CAST. This number
has risen over 18,000 links since 2000. For
example, some of these sites that have links to
CAST are the Center for Global and Regional
CENTER FOR ADVANCED SPATIAL TECHNOLOGIES 45