2011 Esri Federal UC

Table of Contents Meeting Info Geoportal In the Cloud: NOAA Some Key NOAA Geoportal Concerns Misc. Comments Geospatial One-Stop/Data.gov Discussion: USGS Action Items/Follow-ups

Meeting Info

• What: Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)/Geoportal Extension User Group
• When: Friday, January 21, 2011; 2:30-3:30 PM, Room 303

Geoportal In the Cloud: NOAA

• NOAA has a number of Geoportal Implementations; the one today is a demonstration of an implementation recently done using the ESRI Cloud & ESRI's professional services
• This was implemented as a pilot effort to understand what it would take to use the ESRI cloud
• It was a basic installation with minor customizations for look & feel
• NOAA is considering long-term management in the cloud; not sure if they will continue with this approach. This implementation was developed as a means to understand management capabilities and costs for the long term.
• Some NOAA members noted that they wanted to ensure that the NOAA approach retained flexibility for different organizations within the agency.

Some Key NOAA Geoportal Concerns

(Request follow-up by Marten/ESRI) Some additional comments & concerns noted by NOAA personnel for larger Geoportal issues are included below.

• Standards adherence: Metadata cataloging is driven by definition files that do not adhere to standards (CSDGM or ISO). When ESRI says it is FGDC compliant, it is FGDC "best practices" compliant. What this means is that all of our metadata records written in compliance with the CSDGM will not ingest into Geoportal without modifications to either the record, the software or both. As it stands, our record holdings are inaccessible for search and discovery through the Geoportal. Software needs a lot of customization to work with standard metadata records. Anticipate significant effort to get these metadata definition files written & implemented. Questions:
  • Can you add a true xslt or stylesheet to the Geoportal to display metadata in FGDC HTML format?
  • Can we import the FGDC (or any standard) xml schema to validate against or build a pipeline that would create the definition files from true schemas?
• FlexViewer: The current version of FlexViewer will only show 10 records for a search. ESRI is working on pagination but doesn't have a timeframe as to when this will be made available to the community. When an updated version of the viewer is available, users will have to compile it themselves before using it. Questions:
  • Can you provide a status/update regarding this issue?
  • When using the 'see results' through REST option (GEORSS, ATOM, HTML, FRAGMENT, KML, JSON), only the data shown in the current list will be used. If list exceeds more than a page, each one of the pages is its own separate REST feed.
  • Has anyone has built up their own map locator for Geoportal?
• Download data: The download data function for data discovered through (or as a result of) a metadata search. ESRI shows a download function but it is its own separate tab within the Geoportal i.e. there is no connection between the discovery (search) and data download (access). Data download from distributed sources (data repositories) is an essential user function for NOAA constituents. Question: Has any thought been given to providing this data download functionality?
• Ontology: Currently only one ontology service can be selected for use in a search

query and would require significant customization to modify. Question: Is it possible to map to other existing vocabularies (i.e. Marine Metadata Inventory, Coastal & Marine Spatial Planning, etc.)?

Misc. Comments

• ESRI directs Geoportal users to the ArcCatalog interface for metadata creation, which will not work for all our needs (or external user needs).
• Search interface limitations OTB search does not fully meet our customer search (i.e. temporal search) and access requirements. Any searching beyond OTB would take substantial amount of customization.
• ArcGIS 10-- problem with defining projection to a raster image (Normally we could add customer defined project information to a raster layer, but the procedure is quite complex in ArcGIS10. I would like to know if there is a simple way to do that).

Geospatial One-Stop/Data.gov Discussion: USGS

• The GOS website and catalog will be retired by July 2011
• Currently, the plan is to migrate to Data.gov and move content and appropriate functionality
• Discussions are underway for how to transfer the data and present it to user; what type of functionality will be included by when
• Some key issues to address:
  • Data.gov currently provides access to Executive/Federal data. How will non-Federal data be handled?
  • What functionality is needed from Data.gov that GOS currently provides?
  • The numbers metric will be replaced with better metrics for measuring benefits/outputs/success
  • Handling information that is stored in the database that relates to the metadata but doesn't come from the original source (e.g., votes, comments, ranking)
• Data.gov team members will be reaching out to agencies as content is migrated

Action Items/Follow-ups

• Marten/ESRI to follow-up on NOAA questions shown above
• Michelle to try and get teleconference and web conferencing for next SIG (at IUC in July).

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