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2009 Esri International UC

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Table of Contents

Meeting Info

  • What: Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) & Geospatial Portal Toolkit (GPT)
  • When: July 14, 2009

Brief Status from Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) Around the World

  • INSPIRE (Research Center [JRC]): The INSPIRE geoportal includes information from EU Member States within the framework of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) Directive. The prototype INSPIRE geoportal currently accesses a limited number of discovery and view services. These will increase as more services become available from the EU Member States.
    • The INSPIRE team is in the process of implementing rules for discovery and view functions and is hoping to have download and transformation services. The JRC goes through a complex evaluation of the application that includes feedback and testing.
    • The countries within the INSPIRE application are at different phases of contribution and compliancy. There may be a task force developed for helping countries to become compliant. The calendar set forth by the directive is strict. Each member state has to meet international requirements. The directive includes general requirements and principles so member states must comply.
    • For more information, visit http://www.inspire-geoportal.eu/
  • US NSDI (USGS): Geospatial One-Stop is a public gateway for improving access to U.S. geospatial information and data under the Geospatial One-Stop E-Government initiative. Some key activities this past year have included:
    • Setting up a link checking service that checks web mapping services. This link checking service provides a report on whether or not a service is working. It currently supports WMS link checking and will be extended to WFS as well.
    • Setting up the ability to have special collections that cross-cut other topic areas. For example, a user can find information within coastal regions.
    • Providing a link to data.gov. GOS allows data.gov to search for geospatial data directly from the GOS catalog.
    • Providing additional search outputs including RSS and KML feeds to project onto Google Earth. There is also a search widget that can be embedded into your own web page. Users can take advantage of the collection at GOS and implement the widget within their own web pages.
    • GOS also had a new category in the FGDC CAP Grants this year that was aimed at taking advantage of the new interfaces that GOS offers.
    • For more information, visit http://geodata.gov (7/1/2013 note: the site has been retired, the new site is http://data.gov)
  • GSDI (Enterprise Planning Solutions): The Indonesian NSDI provides a view of geospatial information across 11 major national institutions. Its sole purpose was to manage their geospatial data better and take a major step toward delivery of data.
    • The Indonesian NSDI was looked at from business and organizational framework. They aligned ownership and the authority to deliver data, and organized how they captured metadata production and distribution. Workflows are coordinated across 11 different agencies well before getting to the publishing lifecycle. Regulatory drivers are used to clarify the roles & responsibilities before publishing. There is a governance model that is being set up that is intended to be adopted. Every discussion has an undertone related to setting rules for contributing. They wanted to make sure that everyone was operating under the same guidelines.
    • In terms of the technology approach, within 2 months they designed the system and workflows and then will be moving to acquisition. There is a current investment of $65 million. This was set up as a social benefit there is a significant need for natural resource protection. Additionally, there are a lot of development needs related to transportation efforts and natural disasters.
  • CUAHSI (University of Texas Austin): The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CHUASI) is an organization representing more than one hundred United States universities that receive support from the National Science Foundation to develop infrastructure and services for the advancement of hydrologic science and education in the U.S. The team has been developing water observations information (groundwater data, etc.) and has adapted the GPT software into a hydro portal. The team developed CHUASI Water Markup Language (WaterML), which is an XML schema defining the format of messages returned by the WaterOneFlow web services. WaterOneFlow is a term for a group of web services created by and for CHUASI to provide programmatic access to a collection of national, state, and individual investigator hydrologic observation repositories.
    • The team is working with ESRI and NOAA and USGS for this effort. In the US, there are about 2 million locations where water information is collected water measurement time series data. The team built a bunch of web scrapers to ingest the information automatically, and then built some languages to get data from these different locations. They have various core functions that are available for data access, including getdata, getsites, getvariables, getvalues. Then, they built a water data metadata catalog that includes information about water data time series. Now that they already have a national infrastructure for exchanging this information, they have been trying to make the appropriate connections back to the NHD and other national water data sets effectively.
    • The ArcHydro team is working on a viewer that can connect to the water stations and retrieve the data and download them. The GPT has enabled this hydro viewer to discover some of the hydro network information and then connect to it using the hydro viewer. The GPT itself is just a catalog and is focused on the access they HydroViewer is built on the Javascript API from ArcGIS server. They took the USGS and EPA data that they already have and are making one-to-many connections with the time series data.
    • A similar effort is being done in Europe and Australia. Australia is currently in the middle of a drought, so water is a hot topic. They had to develop their specific services and service specifications.
    • For more information, visit http://www.cuahsi.org/

GPT 9.3.1 Beta site

Back at the beginning of May, we asked our list serve to do some testing on the GPT 9.3.1 Beta site. Marten's comments regarding the results of the Beta testing:

  • There was not really a beta version of the software for ArcGIS server. As such we posted a site, where we were all administrators. The ESRI team posted new information to the site as it was made available and used the site heavily as a way to figure out what was not working, etc. That resulted in them being able to finalize the version that was completed last week.
  • Marten will provide a document that includes a summary of the beta testing results and the follow-ups/actions taken.
  • New aspects of group access to metadata: a while back GPT had group access to metadata. In 9.3.1 you can now configure the portal to have different access levels for metadata, including
    • Unrestricted: Allows all users to access all approved resource descriptions.
    • Public-Protected: Allows all users to access public documents and only allows members of one specific group to see protected documents.
    • Restricted: Allows all users to access the unrestricted documents, but only specified groups have access to restricted documents.
  • For more information, visit http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/geoportal/whats_new.html

User Questions/Comments:

  • INSPIRE: They had a specific problem with multiple authentication methods. They are looking at how to deal with a portal that is in use within an internal organization and to provide a means for non-authenticated users. Answer: The GPT allows you to configure access control in many ways a user could potentially allow configuration for OpenID. Can accept that as a means to join internal user store with external users.
  • The Conterra SDI suite has metadata security management expertise. They put a security layer in between the clients that allows control to access the services. It is quite flexible and users can define security rules as you want. A user is able to access things down to the level of time frame, spatial extent, etc. It can be integrated within a legacy environment and can integrate into the local LDAP etc. Demos are available at the Conterra booth. They have an integration package with the Portal and can show it if interested. For more information, visit http://www.conterra.de/en/products/sdi/ifc/index.shtm
  • NOAA CSC: works with many agencies within NOAA and was wondering about the ability to search by partner collection. Answer: GPT help is now available at the main ESRI help site (http://webhelp.esri.com). If you visit this site, you will see that the geo portal extension is listed there. One of the lesser known features is that you can add fields to the search capability and you can provide the ability to search your own catalog or others.
    • (Innovate!, Inc/EPA): We would like to see this feature implemented as well. We think that the version at GOS works the way we would like it to in the GPT software. Esri: If you can write up how you would like it to look, we can consider it.
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