Case Study: Oregon Marine Board achieves real-time, embeddable boating maps and major cost and time savings with Socrata

A Three-Year Problem Solved in Two Hours

The Oregon Marine Board, represented by public information officer Ashley Massey, struggled for three years to create an easy-to-update online map of boating resources after a damaged Access database, labor-intensive Google Maps work that was later deleted, and vendor solutions that were costly and inadequate. Massey needed a low-cost, searchable, maintainable solution to publish and keep hundreds of boat ramp and facility records current.

Using Oregon’s new Socrata open data portal, Massey uploaded her dataset and built a map in under two hours at no charge. The platform now hosts many boating datasets, supports real-time updates from facility managers, embeddable maps, and citizen-created views — cutting publication time roughly in half, improving accuracy and efficiency, and avoiding large print and verification costs.

Oregon Marine Board

Ashley Massey

Public Information Officer