PUMA

PUMA  Overview

PUMA is primarily an Internal tool for County departments. We no longer sell/distribute/support PUMA for the public or external users.

The Josephine County Geographic Information Systems department has developed an ArcView GIS tool that provides the user with a simple interface for viewing, querying, mapping, and reporting on many aspects of land use, land ownership, and the natural environment in Josephine County.  The application also makes this information easy to disseminate by providing ready-made maps and property reports.

The application is focused on parcel level data and includes most of the information available through the County Assessors office.  In addition, many layers of GIS data may be accessed to give a much more comprehensive picture of land in Josephine County.  The GIS data includes information about soils, rivers and streams, slopes, topography, and flood zones, as well as geo-referenced aerial photography and digital USGS 7.5 minute quad maps. 

General Use Guidelines

The user is initially presented with the Puma view.  This view has many base map features already loaded and symbolized appropriately.  This allows user’s to begin using the GIS immediately instead of hunting around for the proper data sources and getting them symbolized appropriately. 

The user interface has been customized with the addition of a number of tools and buttons.  These customizations are provided to allow novice GIS user’s to accomplish tasks that they would be otherwise be unable to perform, such as producing property reports using Crystal Reports, or to speed-up and enhance common functions such as labeling features in the view.

There will still be maps and/or reports that will require the involvement of a GIS professional.  In these instances the GIS staff, located at 510 NW 4th St., Grants Pass, OR, is available to help you attain the goals of your GIS project.

Arcview and PUMA components

When referencing the help system it will be useful to know the basic components of the program.  The image below is labeled to show the Menu Bar, Button Bar, Tool Bar, the view - generally referred to as the PUMA view in this help document - and the Table of Contents. 

Menus and buttons work approximately the same, they start some process for the user.  For example, they will bring up a dialog for the user to create a graphic shape, or a graphic outline will be drawn around the currently selected tax lot.  Tools are a little different, they are activated and then the user applies the tool within the View window.  Tools, therefore are generally for interacting with a very specific portion of the View.  For example, the Latitude/Longitude tool is used to find the specific latitude and longitude of point the user "clicks"  in the view window.

The Project window is where documents are managed in Arcview.  If you close the PUMA view, it can be re-opened from the project window.  New views, layouts, and other document types are also created here.  When using PUMA this window is usually hidden behind the PUMA view, and is rarely used by beginning users.

The PUMA view is the customized view document.  It is automatically opened when PUMA is launched.  It takes up most of the area of the image below.  This is where the user interacts with the various map components.  The Table of Contents (TOC), is aligned vertically along the left side of the view.  This is where the themes are managed.  The small check mark on a theme means it is visible, unchecking the theme (by clicking on it) will make the theme invisible (it is not drawn in the view).