Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Project

Purpose:

Sharedgeo is building a spatial data repository of old and new data related to the Great lakes and surrounding watersheds. This repository of data will be easily accessible as an online resource for downloading of raw data as well as SharedGeo original derived products.

This project is intended as a means to aggregate data, both recent as well as historically collected over time to provide Great Lakes Restoration partners a mechanism to store and retrieve spatial data easily and in a timely manner related to a location or spatial reference. An additional aspect of the project is to provide value added products in the form of  spatially georeferenced data such as oblique aerial photography, aerial ortho-photography and ground collected data such as field photography and field research notes.

The SharedGeo online systems will also allow partners to upload those data sets that they wish to share with other partners by providing a set of standardized distribution tools that can be utilized by all project partners in their desktop software of choice as well as make it possible for SharedGeo to build out additional custom datasets that can be derived for these stored datasets.

The SharedGeo development team is ready to build out custom interfaces to its online data stores and systems upon request as well as link together other existing web enabled data stores from across the net as well as provided by GLRI business partners.

Vast amounts of data can be distributed with the system.  An initial offering will include  indexing and locational interpretation of approximately 10TB of Stereo aerial imagery of the U.S. side of the Great Lakes Shoreline.  This imagery was collected in 2008  at half meter resolution.

Software:

This project centers around a web client framework enabled to search for spatially referenced and geocoded data organized in an online data repository.

The user interfaces consist of a Map Viewer which provides the user the capability to spatially look up information pertaining to an area of interest by windowing a location over the map. Additionally there exists a textual query engine that can be combined with the spatial search to additionally filter the results.

An online loader is available for uploading spatial information into the system in a dynamic fashion that can then be accessed via the mapping interface as well as be filtered on with the textual query process.

The number of available layers of spatial information that can be loaded into the service and presented to the online end users is almost limitless, and is only constrained by the physical disk space on the server.

Hardware:

The hardware that is behind the scenes is configured in such a way as to be easily augmented and added to. Fail over and redundancy of services has been carefully configured into the systems that serve up the GLRI services.

The existing computer hard disk space can be added to over time as more data is loaded without impacting services. Additionally the system can be configured with redundancy via the configuration of multiple and redundant nodes of storage.

High bandwidth connections to the internet provide the highest level of service to the end users desiring to download data related to their area of interest.

Services:

Value added services provided by the SharedGeo development team are also available to the users of the system.

Data loaded into the system is automatically indexed for rapid lookup and can be configured to be available as standardized data feeds in the form of OGC, WMS and/or WFS services.  This enables the data stores to be easily used by many standards compliant desktop applications as well as providing for the end users to build their own, or integrate with existing data access systems if they choose.

SharedGeo is versed in document geocoding for retrieval inside of spatial data systems. Online services for geocoding documents and spatial features are included in the services available online. These capabilities allow the custodians of digital documents to geo-located said documents and/or allowing SharedGeo developers to automate the geo-coding process for many such files in automated fashion.