Geospatial Overview
Overview
Locational information for the Facility Registry Service (FRS) is obtained from EPA federal program systems, EPA regional offices, states, and sophisticated geocoding routines.
The primary objective of this service is to identify, collect, verify, store, and maintain an accurate, consistently documented set of locational data for entities of environmental concern. A secondary objective is to support the infrastructure needed to manage these data in a manner that yields integration across national, regional, tribal, and state systems. The intent is to support EPA's movement toward data integration based on location, thereby promoting the use of EPA's data resources for a wide array of cross-media analysis, such as community-based ecosystem management.
The locational information in Envirofacts is stored in the Geospatial Tables. The Geospatial Tables act as a storehouse for the actual locational data as well as the business rules that are applied to them in order to provide the most accurate information available for depicting the locations of federally regulated entities.
Geospatial Tools
A variety of tools are available as part of the Envirofacts Warehouse that allow you to mine locational information and associated documentation from the EPA Geospatial Tables. FRS Query contains multiple map outputs and displays and provides an option to display the output of the facilities meeting the entered search criteria as a KML file.
The EZ Query allows you to select key data elements and build ad-hoc queries from EPA's Facility Information and related Geospatial Data to build a tabular html report or a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file for downloading. Geospatial Download page provides downloadable files of EPA’s Facility Information and related Geospatial Data in a variety of file formats.
Geospatial Data Download Service
GIS Applications
There are many Agency applications that utilize locational information from the FRS Geospatial Reference Tables. Any application that displays facility points from the National Shapefile Repository or the EPA Spatial Data Library System (ESDLS) is utilizing coordinates from the Geospatial Structures. In addition to the maps displayed within the Envirofacts and FRS Queries Web queries these applications also make use of Facility Coordinate Information in the FRS Geospatial Reference Tables:
My Environment
My Environment is a Geographic Information System (GIS) application that provides a wide range of federal, state, and local information about environmental conditions and features in an area of your choice.
EnviroMapper for Envirofacts
EnviroMapper provides a map interface to discover facility locations and associated environmental information for the data within the Envirofacts Warehouse.
Geospatial Download
The EPA Geospatial Data Access Project provides downloadable files of EPA Facility Locations and associated information in a variety of data formats.
FRS Geospatial Return File Format
The Geospatial Return File Format describes format that needs to be used to submit latitude and longitude coordinates for use in Envirofacts mapping applications. These coordinates are stored in the Geospatial Reference Tables.
2013 FRS Geospatial Model
This diagram Illustrates the 2013 FRS geospatial model.
- 2013 FRS Geospatial Model (pdf) (34.95 KB)