Open Standards-Based Architectures Scale Up

March 1, 2005 By: Carl Reed

When users are spread throughout a city, a corporation, a state, a province, a nation, or the world, it is highly unlikely that they are employing the same set of geospatial technology, database software, or content models. The only reasonable solution to providing consistent and open access to distributed, highly heterogeneous environments is to have a policy-based commitment to interoperability and the standards that enable interoperability.

National agencies in the United States, Canada, Germany, England, Australia, and other countries are committing to the vision of interoperability by creating open architectures for citizen-access portals, e-government applications, and related spatial data infrastructures. An open architecture is a design based on the concepts of interoperability, standards, and a common framework for applications in which the component systems (Web-based systems, as well as systems from a variety of vendors) work together through standard interfaces and encodings. The best-known examples of such open architectures are the Internet and the World Wide Web. Both are based on hundreds of royalty-free, publicly available standards, such as hypertext markup language (HTML) and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) specifications.

This article describes two large-scale implementations of open standards-based geospatial architectures. One is the National Forest Information Service (NFIS, www.nfis.org), an online map service of the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers (CCFM, www.ccfm.org ). The other initiative is the Regional National Map Project in Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri that illustrates how state and local agencies can, with a small investment, build on the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS, www.usgs.org) The National Map project to accomplish remarkable things.

"Defining Principles" sidebar

Case 1: Sharing Forestry Data

By 1998, GIS technology was in place in most of the Canadian provincial and territorial agencies that assumed managerial responsibility for forest resources. Each organization, however, had implemented its own business process and technology solution for maintaining its respective forest inventories and management-reporting requirements.

Typically, the process for creating reports at the national level involved running numbers in spread-sheet applications at the organizational level, as well as requesting data from other government organizations, waiting for tapes and/or disks in the mail, and converting data formats (DGNs, shapefiles, coverages, MIFs/MIDs) and making sense of data schemas that defined the same feature types in different ways. There existed a national need to develop a better solution for requesting and processing critical information about the status of the nation's forests.

In August 2000, CCFM started an initiative to establish an open standards-based information infrastructure (that is, NFIS) to support sustainable forest management in Canada. GeoConnections, a national partnership tasked with building the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure, and the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) also joined this effort.

The ministers charged the CCFM-NFIS steering committee with the phased implementation of NFIS. This included developing a governance model defining the roles and responsibilities of each jurisdiction, defining the information needed to respond to sustainable forest-management commitments, examining opportunities for cooperation and coordination with other government and department agencies, and taking into account each jurisdiction's investments in their inventory programs.

Making It Happen. NFIS was one of the earliest adopters of the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC, www.opengeospatial.org) Web Services. Rick Morrison, former NFIS technical lead, selected CubeWerx's implementation of the OpenGIS Web Map Service (WMS) specification even before WMS was fully implemented in CubeServ, the server-side product. As an early adopter, NFIS was able to share its requirements, test new versions, and actively participate with the CubeWerx development team.