Spatial Structures

First, go to http://geoserver.isciences.com and you can start to look at all of the information that’s available. You can search by entering words into the search engine. At the bottom of the first page, you’ll see featured maps as well as new ones that have just been entered. In the bottom right, they are grouped into categories so that you can see different lists.

Once you have a list of maps, you can click on the name to see the full metadata record. This lets you read the pedigree of the map, and find more information from its original provider. If it is available, you can click on the ‘Interactive Map’ button to see the map in a browser.

With our Interactive Map Viewer, you can pan and zoom the map to focus on your area of interest. You can see the map legend, and turn on outlines of national and subnational boundaries. You can generate a PDF image that can be downloaded for printing. This is an excellent way to learn about the map and see whether it has the data that you are interested in.

Want to study the map in more detail? You can download our Global Data Viewer (GDV) application and install it on your PC. Start it up and check the Map Library and find the name of the map. It may ask you to download it, which should take just a few seconds. Then, the map will open and you can use the tools in GDV to better use it.

Already have GDV or GDA but you don’t have a map installed that you can see on the GeoServer? If you have the ability to Import TerraViva Maps in the File menu, you can download it from GeoServer by clicking on the ‘Download’ button, unzipping the file and importing the map. You don’t even need to exit GDV while you’re doing this.

Organizing your geospatial knowledge is an opportunity for increasing your organization’s capabilities. Each implemented project can make it easier to perform the next challenge, as long as the data can be easily found and used.

Isciences is a good example of a company in the midst of this process. Originally, each project was organized separately with nothing more sophisticated than sets of folders to load all of the datasets and references. There may be spreadsheets developed to help describe the data, but no standard methodology would have been used.

Today, a web-server based system relying heavily on open-source software is being deployed for both internal use as well as to our clients and the public at-large. It provides a mechanism to capture all of the descriptive metadata for maps and databases, as well as the means to visualize and analyze the data.

Rather than using a single-vendor approach which may restrict options in the future, we’ve built the solution around three main open-source systems:

• Geonetwork – a metadata management application built by the FAO

• Mapserver – a powerful map server built by the University of Minnesota under a NASA grant

• FEDORA – a digital repository system developed under a DARPA grant that is widely used by major institutions.

A GeoFedora web application was developed by Isciences to provide access and management for spatially referenced statistical data and maps. It supports retrieving the data using multiple standard protocols, including DDI version 3 (Data Document Initiative).

TerraViva! Software, a simple GIS application for social and earth scientists has been re-written to retrieve data and metadata from this open-source solution. We can keep data current, and the application user will automatically pick up the latest maps and variables.

What’s the impact of all of this? For the serious researcher the biggest benefit is flexibility. They can search through our library of spatial information and choose the most appropriate based on the data’s pedigree. They can see data visualization immediately, using their browser. For full analysis, they can download a free version of our TerraViva! Global Data Viewer and relate the data to all of the other data that is available in the repository. All without having to perform any GIS transformations!

It’s taken some work to make this path, but the benefits are great, both for us and our clients.