The Channel Islands Regional GIS¹ (CIRGIS) is a California nonprofit public benefit corporation that is tax-exempt under the .social welfare. provisions of section 501(c) (4) of the Internal Revenue Code.

CIRGIS is a regional² collaborative³ for the preparation, collection and sharing of spatial data⁴. Its purpose is to facilitate the development and maintenance of an ongoing public-private partnership for sharing⁵ and expanding the use of standard ⁶ spatial data to foster informed community decision making, innovative business development, environmental management and education in the Channel Islands region of California.

Notes:

1. GIS stands for Geographic Information System
2. Regional: The areas within the Channel Islands Region will include but not be limited to: Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, the waters of the Santa Barbara Channel, and the Channel Islands themselves.
3. Collaborative: A round table approach to communicating, planning, documenting and distributing the spatial data of the region.
4. Spatial Data: Data pertaining to the geography of the region. This may include environmental data, political subdivision, cadastral maps, streets and roads, natural resource data, and any other data that have some connection to the geography of the region.
5. Sharing: CIRGIS is committed to making data available to its members and freely accessible to the public.
6. Standards: In order to make these data more accessible to the public and its members, CIRGIS will use metadata and other tools for describing the data and presenting them to the public. Some of the standards that CIRGIS has implemented come from the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC).