I'll be less than 4 hours, Tim. This started out, I think we were supposed to have twenty minutes, then ten and I think the last number that Roger threw out was 1.9 minutes. I'll try to go relatively quickly because it is getting pretty late. I was invited here primarily because I'm the Executive Secretary to the Washington State Board; I also manage the Resource Mapping Section and Department of Natural Resources, which could be characterized as sort of a mini national mapping division. We're a producer of geographic data, a user of geographic data, an archiver of geographic data. We have one of the largest aerial photo film files for state agencies in the U.S. There's about 600,000 photos and we try to make all of this information available to our customers, which includes internal DNR customers and the citizens of Washington.
What I'd like to do in the next couple of minutes is tell you a little bit about the Washington State Board, and some of the naming issues in the state of Washington. The Washington Board is a seven-member board. It is chaired by the Commissioner of Public Lands who is a statewide elected official, which is sort of indicative of the importance of geographic names in the state of Washington, when it's assigned to a state-wide elected official. It has two other state agencies as board members, plus four public members. The reason for that is that we were restructured a few years ago and it's actually a public-controlled committee; they have four of the seven members. We don't go out naming features, we respond to public requests to name features. The legislature has basically outlined the responsibilities of this committee, and it's pretty multi-faceted. It has the standardization issue you've heard from Roger, standardized procedures, it empowers us to coordinate between local governments and federal government, avoid duplication, serve the public interest and, very importantly, there's the cultural aspect of the board which is to retain names that are important to the Native American and pioneer history of the state. So it has a lot to do with controlling the celebration of our history also.
The highlights of our policies and the statutory authorities: we do have laws in the state that govern the use of geographic names. I was thinking about bringing our name caps but that's not really what we are. We're not name cops or police of geographic names; we try to educate people about official names. Because we do maintain all the official records in the state, we coordinate with the U.S. Board, and that's really important because they have a history that goes back over 100 years. They have information that predates most of the state naming authorities and that coordination effort is very, very important for the state. They also maintain information systems that we use and we provide names to the federal systems that we can use.
Databases in the state of Washington need to reflect official names. There are two basic sources of names: geographic names that are names of natural features, and administrative names that are outside the purview of the Board. That would be the names of schools or hospitals, or legislatively mandated names. A very important part of geographic naming is to include some of the descriptive information that we collect during the deliberation process, which is basically the history of the name and how it evolved, and hopefully that information will get into these databases in automated form at some point.
Just a last issue that Randy finally brought up here - there really is a liability issue with geographic data. We've been sued a number of times, we have multi-million dollar law suits involving when we take geographic data and represent it on maps and it's out there for people to use. We're a big target. We sell our data, but when we do that, we have organizations sign a licensing agreement that releases us of any liability. We've got a couple of cases now where a motorcyclist was injured on a trail or road and it's portrayed with a certain use activity - once that data gets out there, they can point it back to your organization. Liability is really something to be concerned about.
So just a quick summary: there are statutes that govern the use of names
in the state of Washington, standardization is important and there are
also the cultural aspects of names that are very important. Thank you.
Any questions? Linda, I've got an application packet that I'll give you
and I've got a couple of them here if people want to see these materials,
it's how to go about appliance, the statutory information about the Board.