GeoPlatform

The National Geospatial Platform:What’s New and What’s Next?

Jerry Johnston

Esri International User Conference

30 June 2016

GeoPlatform

A (Very) Brief History of the US NSDI

• Executive Order 12906 (1994) called for the establishment of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI)Defined as the “technologies, policies and people necessary to

promote sharing of geospatial data throughout all levels of government, the private and non-profit sectors, and the academic community”

Goals include reducing duplication and costs, while making more geographic information available to the public and partners in government and the private sector

• Standards development and registries (Geospatial One Stop, Data.gov) followedTens of thousands of datasets registered to shared catalogs

Early history of the NSDI

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…Now What?

…Or maybe the right question is:

So what?

GeoPlatform

The Need for a New Strategy

• The role of government in the geospatial ecosystem has changed

• Use of geospatial data and maps in the public sector is pervasive

• Some significant challenges to address:Past approaches have not allowed for significant collaboration

among partners in the NSDI or users of data/services/maps

Making sure it all “works” when you need it to (e.g., service availability and quality)

We have (mostly) made metadata for people to read… not machines.

What problems need to be solved?

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GeoPlatform

NSDI Strategic Plan Includes:• 3 Strategic Goals• 9 Objectives• 29 Actions

NSDI Strategic Plan Goals

NSDI Strategic Plan (FY14 – FY16)

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GeoPlatform

STRATEGIC GOAL 1:

Develop Capabilities for National Shared Services

Objective 1.1. Develop geospatial interoperability reference architecture

Objective 1.2. Establish the Geospatial Platform as the Federal geospatial data, services, and applications Web-based service environment

Objective 1.3. Expand the use of cloud computing

Objective 1.4. Promote the use of geospatial multiagency acquisition vehicles for interagency and intergovernmental purchases

NSDI Strategic Goal #1

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GeoPlatform

STRATEGIC GOAL 2:

Ensure Accountability and Effective Development and Management of Federal Geospatial Resources

Objective 2.1. Advance the portfolio management process for National Geospatial Data Assets (NGDA)

Objective 2.2. Identify potentially duplicative investments and opportunities for collaborative investments

NSDI Strategic Goal #2

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GeoPlatform

STRATEGIC GOAL 3:

Convene Leadership of the National Geospatial Community

Objective 3.1. Lead and participate in the development and coordination of national and international standards applicable to the geospatial community

Objective 3.2. Convene the leadership of the geospatial and nongeospatial communities to develop public/private partnerships and shared approaches for addressing critical national issues

Objective 3.3. Raise awareness of the NSDI and its impact on critical national and international issues

NSDI Strategic Goal #3

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GeoPlatform

What is GeoPlatform.gov?

• Implements key objectives of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) Strategic Plan, and the National Geospatial Data Asset (NGDA) Management Plan

• Consistent, reliable portal to nation’s vast ecosystem of open geospatial data/services

• Means for our stakeholders to publish their content once and have it accessed from anywhere

• A services platform for providing direct access to the nation’s online geospatial resources Single point of access for finding data assets, services, layers and maps Provides shared hosting services for our stakeholdersWe deal with the tough IT challenges: consistent access, reliability, scalability

and performance

• Shared core application services for stakeholder collaboration (e.g., building shared map galleries for a community of interest)

A concerted effort to share open geospatial data and technology

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GeoPlatform

Why GeoPlatform.gov?

• Reduce costs of producing, managing and sharing authoritative open data

• Moving towards interoperable web services to provision all “nationally significant” data

• Providing robust infrastructure for hosting these services where needed

• Assessing, measuring and monitoring data and service quality

• Making data and maps more usable through shared knowledge

• Enhance platform services and facilitate access to nation’s geospatial resources for developers

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GeoPlatform

What we’ve accomplished in past 18 months

• Building out core services for our SaaS/PaaS

• Building better tools for managing our assets

• Laying foundations for secure, reliable, scalable, hardened services in the Cloud

• Starting to make it easier for people to find the right resources for the right task

• Building and testing core services for developers to access platform for open data and open services

Towards high-performance web services for core geospatial assets (NGDA)• Dashboards• Asset Registries• Map Viewers• Shared Maps• Web Service APIs

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GeoPlatform

Towards 5★ Open ServicesFrom open data sharing towards an open services experience

Level of Openness

Description Benefits

★

Proprietary service is available on the Web through a licensed (for fee), non-standard interface

O.K. It's nice to have service on the Web, however, the licensed and proprietary nature of the interface hinders interoperability and widespread adoption.

★★

Proprietary service is available on the Web through a publicly available, non-standard interface

Splendid! It's great to have a publicly available service on the Web,however, the proprietary nature of the interface hinders interoperability and widespread adoption.

★★★

Service is available on the Web through a publicly available, candidate open standard interface (i.e., a new standard with public support and tangible adoption)

Excellent! The barriers to interoperability have been lowered by the use of a candidate open standard. (This stage is a necessary step in evolving the platform and getting others to use it.)

★★★★Service is available on the Web through a publicly available, open standard interface

Wonderful! The barriers to interoperability have been greatly reduced by the use of an well-established, adopted open standard, from a credible standards organization like W3C or OGC.

★★★★★

Open source service is available on the Web through a publicly available, open standard interface

Brilliant! Not only is the service open and interoperable, but its source code is available for those whose wish to integrate and tailor this reusable service for their needs.

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GeoPlatform

• What’s New:

Look and feel

Additional map viewer functionality

Create and import maps from Esri’s ArcGIS Online

Create and embed Map Galleries into external sites

Portfolio management capabilities to measure and manage national geospatial data assets

Enriched geospatial marketplace

Secure scalable Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure

GeoPlatform Today

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GeoPlatform

• Enhanced navigation to quickly direct users to specific areas of interest

• Account registration and management for added access and functionality

• Tutorials and training opportunities

• Help tools

• Dedicated and responsive Service Desk

New User Benefits

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GeoPlatform

• GeoPlatform Marketplace

• Quickly post and easily search for planned data acquisitions

• Publish and find planned data collection projects

• Expand opportunities to partner on data acquisitions (reducing costs and duplicate efforts)

• Initial implementation supports USGS 3D Elevation Program

Investment Efficiency

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GeoPlatform

• A16 NGDA Theme Communities

• NGDA Collaboration Community (NCC) expanded from the Theme Lead Collaboration Community

• Federal Agency Communities:

GeoCONOPS

WWHGD

• New Communities

Communities

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GeoPlatform

• Multiple data browse, filter, and sort features

• Dataset preview

• Add user content: Digitize

features or Upload .KML,

GeoJSON, .CSV, or

shapefiles (in .ZIP) to

extract features

• Gazetteer and Geolocation

support

• Control layer ordering,

visibility, opacity

• Save and share maps (Web

Map Context)

• Publish composed maps

Web Map Viewer

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GeoPlatform

• Browse harvested AGOL maps by search filters or organization

• Create map galleries with maps from WMV and AGOL

• Share maps and galleries via email

• Embed map blocks and curated gallery pages into other websites

• Customize gallery page with community and keywords

• Manage gallery pages

• Permissions-based access and use

Map Manager

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GeoPlatform

• Harvest maps from ArcGIS online organizations and publish them to the GeoPlatform

• Search and Discover maps by search filters or organization

• Unlimited publishing of data and maps to AGOL*

• Create map galleries with maps from WMV and AGOL

ArcGIS Online Integration

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GeoPlatform

• Tools to measure,

monitor, and

report on NGDAs

and services

• NGDA Dataset

Lifecycle Maturity

Assessment

survey tools

• Service Checker

Performance Dashboard

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GeoPlatform

Performance Dashboard - Reliability

Reliability of USGS National Structures Service

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GeoPlatform

What we are planning for next 12 months

• Implementing Registry+, our new central hub for finding and using significant GeoPlatform / NSDI resources

Plan to greatly enhance discovery

A unified registry for core GeoPlatform business objects

• Fixing logical consistency (schema, syntax), semantic consistency, and access issues in our metadata holdings

• Improving capabilities for monitoring and tracking health & status of services

• After rigorous testing and trials, start to roll out open service hooks for developers

• Want developers implementing and contributing back open source components that leverage and extend the GeoPlatformecosystem

Achieve the High-Performance Web Services experience from Cloud…

Data assets

Service assets

Layer assets

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GeoPlatform

Registry+ Model

• Purpose: Manage registers for significant GeoPlatform resources (Datasets, Services, Layers, Maps,…)

• Registry+ Core Model is a superset of DCAT and is aligned with existing standards: Dublin Core, DCAT, DCAT-AP, GeoDCAT-AP, Project Open Data 1.1, ISO 19115 and 19119

• The Registry+ Core Model can be extended by using application profiles

A standards-based, extensible model for all significant resources

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GeoPlatform

Registry+ REST API

• Hypermedia-driven REST API with following benefits:Level 3 REST (Richardson Maturity Model)

API change friendly – API changes don’t break clients

Explorable API

Inline documentation

Easy to implement client logic

Server owns resource state and shields client from complexities

Versioning with links

• Use of Hypermedia Application Language (HAL) format Use of links to transition to other states

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GeoPlatform

Roadmap

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GeoPlatform

Enhancing Discovery and Use

• Prototyping better ways for people to find exactly what they need, quickly and effectively, in a vast ecosystem of GeoPlatform resources

• Exploring ways to enhance metadata efficiently

• Ensuring efficient and effective ways for developers to access GeoPlatform resources machine-to-machine (Registry+)

• A peek into the future – Computer-assisted Open Map sharing (Open Map Demo)

• Stay tuned……

Tackling the challenges of finding just the right fit-for-purpose resource from amongst many thousands of candidates

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GeoPlatform

Open Map Demo

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GeoPlatform

Conclusion

GeoPlatform is helping advance the NSDI by enabling users to:

More easily find existing maps and data: Semantic search / Knowledge graphs will help users surface the right content more quickly and easily

Get access to more high quality NSDI services: Cloud hosting offerings have the ability to change the game in terms of making high quality data available

Understand (and improve!) the quality of the NSDI services: Service status checker and performance dashboard an continuously monitor the component services of the distributed NSDI

More easily share data, tools, maps and collaborate: GeoPlatform offerings bring collaboration and analytics tools at scale to end users in all sectors

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GeoPlatform

Thank you

Jerry Johnstonjerry_johnston@ios.doi.gov