By Adena Schutzberg and members of the ESG Team

With all the mapping portals available today on the Web, there's clearly no "one size fits" all that addresses the needs of everyone. Instead, focused portals addressing specific needs are popping up. The user friendliness of the Web means that they can be as accessible to scientists as to students and amateurs. One case in point is NASA's Earth Science Gateway, ESG.

François-Xavier Prunayre
GIS Engineer
International Office For Water

The French Data Reference Centre for Water (Sandre) has been in charge of implementing a common language for water data exchange since 1993. The Sandre is a common initiative within the French Information System for Water (SIE), a national project managed by the French Ministry of Ecology and sustainable development. The French Information System for Water includes ministries, river basin agencies, offices for water, INERIS (National Institute for the Industrial Environment and Risk), BRGM (Bureau of Research for Geology and Minerals), EDF (electric group), MeteoFrance (weather agency) and the Office International de l'Eau (International Office of Water).

By George Percivall
Executive Director, Interoperability Architecture
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

The 2003 Earth Observation Summit (EOS) called for an international effort to establish a comprehensive, coordinated and sustained Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). Sixty-one countries and forty international organizations, including the OGC, are now involved in GEOSS.

by Adena Schutzberg Consultant to OGC

A City like Any Other

The City of San Mateo, California is like many others when it comes to GIS. It stores its data in a relational database: SQL Server. It uses high end tools for editing, mapping and analysis: GeoMedia from Intergraph. It publishes its maps on the Web using a tool for that purpose: GeoMedia Web Map. And, like other cities, and many citizens of the world, it's enamored with Google Earth.

By Rob Woodcock
SEE Grid Community Director & Computational Services Architect
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

Australia has a relatively mature minerals exploration environment, with large amounts of geological data distributed between the Australian Government, various state governments, research organisations and industry. The primary users of these data are in the global mineral exploration industry. Other users are focussed on various planning and environmental activities. The Solid Earth and Environment Grid (SEEGrid) community recognises that poor data interoperability is a major barrier to the effective use of these existing data. Data interchange standards are limited or absent, and the fragmented nature of the mining software market adds to the problem. The objective of the SEEGrid community is to foster the development of open information standards in the earth and environment domain. To demonstrate the real advantages of easy data interchange, a testbed for real-time interoperability between data housed in the geological surveys of the various states and territories in Australia has been undertaken. The initial project involved three jurisdictions sharing a border in central Australia. The primary technical collaborators are the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Geoscience Australia (GA), Social Change Online (SCO) and Fractal Technologies (FT), as well as each of the participating surveys.

The number of Web Map Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS) that implement OpenGIS(R) interfaces on the Internet rises each week as more organizations realize the power of using the open standards. At the same time, the number of WMS and WFS clients - designed for use in a browser, or on the desktop or on a mobile device - are growing. There's a lot of excitement around these developments and one big question comes up time and again: How do I find the different services that are available to use with these standards-based clients? Several different organizations have tackled that question in recent months, but most ultimately depend on organizations "signing up" or registered their WMS or WFS sites. One addition, from Boris Boege at Skylab Mobilesystems in Germany, works differently. "The WMS-Crawler" he explains, "works pretty much like any search engine. It crawls for keywords which might indicate a link to a WMS and tries to parse it with a WMS Capabilities parser. He shared that in its early days, back in April of 2005, the list created by the Crawler was updated irregularly. Now, it gets updated once a week.

Some of the many servers found by WMS Crawler.