Montana gets a GIS Portal

The state of Montana has a new GIS Portal. The portal was announced today by The Montana State Library and was featured on mtbusiness.com (New State Geographic Information Portal Launched) where it was picked up by Adena Schutzberg and passed along to the rest of us on All Points Blog.

The State Library GIS chief shares a statement of purpose in the mtbusiness.com story:

"The new Montana GIS Portal will provide improved access to geographic data for our state," said Gerry Daumiller, manager of the Library's GIS section. "Montana agencies are always increasing their use of GIS, whether it's to map water rights or identify land owners affected by a construction project. The new GIS Portal will help them find data to make their GIS work. We will go to the Montana organizations that produce GIS data and make sure it is all accessible to everyone through the Portal."

Based on a quick visit, it looks like the Montana Portal is using standard portal technology, integrated with ESRI's Map Viewer. It has a neat, user-friendly layout. Not all of the links worked in FireFox, but it performed well in Internet Explorer 6, Chrome, and Safari.