Portals, Portals and More Portals

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Portals, Portals and More Portals

• WALIS Forum 2005

Derek Milton ESRI Australia
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Purpose

• Try to understand what these portals are all
  about.
• How we might contribute as a GIS community

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AGENDA

• What are portals
• Portals that address spatial business
• How these portals work
• A look at an example of a portal
• What you might do in your organisations

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Definition of Portal

• Google search 29 returns
• 2 not web related
• a grand and imposing entrance (often extended
  metaphorically) "the portals of the cathedral"
  "the portals of heaven" "the portals of success"
  
• 9 (30) use the term marketing
• Usually used as a marketing term to describe a
  web site that is or is intended to be the first
  place people see when using the web
• 1 A Web "supersite"
• that provides a variety of services including Web
  searching, news, white and yellow pages
  directories, free e-mail, discussion groups,
  online shopping, and links to other sites

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Definition of Portal

• Google search 29 returns
• Most common theme (16)
• Typically a "portal site" has a catalog of
  web sites, a search engine, or both. A portal
  site may also offer email and other service to
  entice people to use that site as their main
  "point of entry" or "gateway" (hence "portal") to
  the Web.
• An internet gateway to a (focused) set of
  services
• general portals include
• Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, CNET, Microsoft Network,
  and America Online's AOL.com
• specialized or niche portals include
• Garden.com (for gardeners), Fool.com (for
  investors), and SearchNetworking.com (for network
  administrators)
• B2B, B2C

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Portals in the Spatial Domain

• Spatial Data Availability (Metadata Portal)
• Geospatial One Stop (GOS)
• Interragator (WALIS)
• ASDD
• Business involving Spatial Information
• Landgate (DLI)
• WaterCorp (ELDP)
• Others??

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Focus on Spatial Information Searching for this
talk

• Drivers
• Collaborate - Spatial Data Expensive (publish
  and consume)
• Search for data and services within the desired
  context (geography/thematic)
• Categorisation cataloging of GIS data and Web
  Services
• Because each and everyone of us can participate
  at one level or another to make it happen.

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Data Providers and Users
Local
States
Feds

• User Community
• Data Searches
• Map Services
• Visualization

Assoc.
Private
GIS Portal
Support Decision Making
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How do these services work?
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The GOS Implementation

• Distributed Data and Services
• Federated Model

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Distributed Catalogs (not GOS)

• Catalogs built at many sites
• Agree on search and result protocols
• Each search will hit every registered catalog
• Slowest site determines performance
• No control on quality of metadata

Service
Service
Service
catalog
Search
Service
catalog
Service
Service
catalog
Service
Service
Service
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Centralised Catalogs (GOS)

• Standardise on content only
• Review process ensures quality
• Small sites maintain metadata directly on portal
• Harvesting and direct publishing of metadata
• Scalable infrastructure ensures stability and
  performance with growing (use of) catalog.

Service
Service
Search
catalog
Service
Service
Service
Service
Service
Service
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Harvesting
Metadata from Publishers
Users search Central Catalog
Metadata Harvesting

• ArcIMS Metadata Servers
• Open Archives Initiative (OAI)
• Z39.50
• Web Accessible Folders

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Map Viewer

• View live data and maps
• Combine multiple map services
• Supports WMS and ArcIMS
• Thick-client viewers available through portal for
  WFS viewing

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Who have Portals Implemented?

• Nationally
• US Federal Government (GOS)
• 75,000 metadata records - Launched July 2003
• European Union
• India
• Norway
• Canada (GeoConnections)
• Others at National and Local Levels (eg State)

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What are people doing with these Portals?Eg
European Union
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What are they doing with these Portals?Creating
Maps
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Other features

• geodata.gov Market Place
• Information Center
• About this Site
• Whats New
• Current Events

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Portal Toolkit

• The following ArcGIS 9 products
• ArcIMS 4.0.1 or 9
• ArcSDE 8.3 or 9
• Minimum of ArcView 8.3
• Plus
• Map Viewer (includes WMS)
• Services to configure the Portal
• Metadata

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GIS Portal Architecture
System Environments
System Components
GIS Portal Application
HTML, HTTP, XLS, XML, JSP
GIS Portal Components
Tool Components (ArcWeb App Objects)
Java Beans, Servlets
ArcIMS Java Connector
Spatial Management Components
ArcIMS App/Spatial Servers
TCP/IP, Sockets
ArcSDE
RDBMS
Data Management Components
SQL
Data
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Metadata Service (Portal)

• If you have the following ArcGIS 9 products
• ArcIMS 9
• ArcSDE 9
• ArcGIS 9 (Arc Catalogue)
• Potential to set up your own metadata services
• Metadata Explorer, a Web application that allows
  you to search and browse the contents of a
  Metadata Server from a Web browser
• Part of ArcIMS

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Why a Metadata Service?

• Allowing data producers to easily publish their
  metadata to a central repository
• People who capture (purchase) data are often not
  the users of the data
• Allowing data consumers to easily search for
  metadata in a central repository
• Position yourself for sharing within the WA SLIP
  and possibly to maintain Interragator?

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Creating Metadata Services

• Metadata Services are a combination of
• Metadata Server component of the ArcIMS Spatial
  Server and the
• ArcSDE database in which published metadata
  documents are stored.
• Services to be set up in ArcIMS (same process as
  an Image Service)
• Appropriate tables in ArcSDE

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The Key to Success?
METADATA

• Work processes to populate the metadata
• Data Capture
• Data purchase
• Require processes to register the data in the
  catalogue.
• Potential for Upgrade to the WALIS Interragator
• Working Group on Metadata

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In Closing

• Portals are really gateways to information for
  some sort of business
• Portals involving geospatial information are not
  unique
• Seek Information
• Do Business
• Geospatial Portals are being implemented fairly
  rapidly across the world
• Many of you probably have the tools to provide a
  centralised metadata service for your
  organisation
• Key is METADATA and work process to attain that.

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Thank You
I HOPE YOU LEARNT SOMETHING NEW ABOUT
PORTALS MORE IMPORTANTLY THE KEY ROLE OF
METADATA AND THE CONTRIBUTION YOU CAN MAKE