The Louisiana GIS CD is a two CD set that contains over 40 spatial layers of geographic data organized by north and south Louisiana. It replaces a prototype version released in 1996. The CD is the culmination of several years of data development and assembly by sponsoring agencies, and was developed by Louisiana State University with funding from the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator's Office. The spatial data on the CD includes a satellite image of Louisiana with environmental, transportation, boundary, and geographic data in raster, polygon, line and point format.

The spatial data are displayed and manipulated with two Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that come with the package. These two systems are ArcView™ 2.1b from Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. and GeoMedia™ 2.0 from the Intergraph Corporation. Vector data are ArcViewÔ shapefile format and NAD-83 geographic latitude/longitude coordinates (decimal degrees). Raster data are packbit compressed geotiffs, NAD-83 UTM zone 15 coordinates (meters).

The CD comes with a user interface that provides easy access to instructions and documentation, software installation, and tutorials. The tutorials provide help for utilization of the GIS software and introductions to GIS concepts. The spatial data are accompanied by fully compliant Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) metadata. There is also a satellite tour of Louisiana accessible from the user interface .

Data on the CD are the best publicly available spatial data sources. Additional data compatible with the CD is available on the LAGIC and Atlas web sites. The CD was originally conceived for Oil Spill Planning and Response, but is applicable for numerous other applications ranging from environmental and resource management to political, business, cultural and demographic. The GIS systems on the CD provide the ability to view, query, manipulate, analyze, and perform numerous functions on the data that will assist in performing research, creating and plotting unique maps, relating data based on spatial and feature attributes, and producing products from the results of custom applications.