Exploring Enterprise GIS Efforts within NOAA and Its Ocean Service

Jason Marshall
Coastal Services Center, NOS

The NOAA Ocean Service has been working on an initiative during the past year, known as the Enterprise Geographic Information System (GIS), to develop an Internet-based portal to National Ocean Service (NOS) spatial data resources. This portal will allow users to find and distribute geospatial data resources in a more unified and coordinated manner. The emphasis is on spatial data sets that internal and external users would be able to access via the Internet using standards-based Open GIS database and mapping technologies. Program and staff offices throughout the National Ocean Service are helping to coordinate and carry out the initiative.

The portal, named the NOS Data Explorer, has three tiers in its architecture: client interfaces, application framework, and distributed/remote data interfaces. Web-based clients will initiate requests through client interfaces, which pass information into the application framework. The application framework processes user requests and operates the distributed/remote data interfaces through data interface adaptors. The distributed/remote data interfaces are connections to remote data holdings.

The client interface tier provides connection points for different client tools. A connection point is a communications port and protocol that accepts requests and responds using one of a number of sub-protocols. Connection points are exposed to the Internet and contain interfaces that translate statements in the sub-protocol into commands. These commands are executed against functions within the application framework. Client tools are Web browsers and GIS software, as well as machine-to-machine tools for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). New connection points can be crafted around the application framework to accommodate any number of client tools.

The application framework contains the operations that can be performed against the remote data providers and sets of data access interface adaptors. The operations of the application framework are a series of units-of-work that can be implemented through a client interface. The operations of the application framework consist of the following: search by keyword; list data by thematic groupings; list all data; get metadata for layer; render map for an area; and request data delivery. These functions are encapsulated and exposed to users through each of the client interface's connection points. Client interfaces are grouped by client tool and are presented to the client tool according to the requirements of the sub-protocol.

The data access interface adaptors are a tool kit of translation mechanisms. These mechanisms translate the incoming parameters from the application framework into statements that can be executed against the remote data provider to perform the unit-of-work being requested by the client interface.

This separation of interface from underlying functionality follows well-established Object Oriented Programming (OOP) techniques and allows the NOS Data Explorer to be extended to engage different clients and unit-of-work expansion as the diversity of tools evolves. The NOS Data Explorer Web portal is developed using a suite of commercial off-the-shelf software tools (ESRI's ArcIMS and ArcSDE) and application development environments (J2EE, JSP/JSTL, and JDBC).

The technologies being implemented within NOAA's Ocean Service have the potential to form a key component of an enterprise-wide approach to GIS within all of NOAA. A demonstration of the NOS Data Explorer portal and lessons learned will be shared during this session.