State of OR Services and Standards

PDX-OSGEO: Session 3 - State of OR Services and Standards March 31, 2011

Milt Hill from State of Oregon GEO office kicks us off:

Conversation about what sorts of standards would be useful for accessing “Framework data” (authoritative data that has some sort of legal implications). Usually maintained by an agency (not always), and usually something that other organizations have a business need for. FIT = Framework implementation teams.

What sorts of goals are there for framework data:

- Data should be discoverable - Data should be identifiable as authoritative - Reliable access (data shouldn’t disappear) - Mechanism of communication between users of the data, and creators of the data

The FIT/ standards process tries to make the above happen, through community conversations and community review

Two potential approaches to incorporating service standards into FIT (not necessarily mutually exclusive):

  1. Develop separate standard document for Web Services
  2. Incorporate specific web service standards into individual, existing FIT Standards

Question is: should there also be goals (FIT standards) that relate to Services?

Lots of kinds of standards: standards for data exchange, standards for simplification, standards for display, standards for caches

Need for volunteers for helping to help articulate useful standards for the state to share with the data community for agreement Eli A: Taxlot/cadastral FIT is currently working to incorporate web service standards into its existing standards.

User community can help define the helpful formats that data can be accessed in

There is an audience for a community (communal?) base map - many folks (maybe the biggest audience) may primarily consume Framework data as part of a base map. Maybe services that support the utilization of Framework data in a consistent base map is a business case / goal that GEO can direct the FIT community (via standards) to work towards.

FYI, ESRI has a project/product called “community base map” from the ESRI cartography group. Intent is that contributors can use a template from ESRI to generate map tiles w/ consistent cartography, and ESRI will host those tiles for all ArcGIS.com users to use...

While the base map use case gets to the need of a lot of folks, it does not get to all business cases. Need levels of product to address all users - start w/ base map, then go to vector services, then to attribute services, etc. Cartographic Tiles -> Geographic Features -> Attribute Interfaces

Rob McD. - soon after committing to services, you get into the territory of needing “Service Level Agreements” - how reliable will all these services be?

There is a pyramid of technical users, and the products they need, and an inverse pyramid of consumers of added value products generated by App developers. so to reach the largest number of consumers, you need to address the needs of App developers

How to make this work; possible approaches:

   * Maybe the goal is to reproduce the success of the Imagery WMS with every other FIT layer..
   * Start with an existing business need (e.g., address geocoding), and develop a service standard around this (following suggestion from Rob M).
   * Work off of the community base map approach (not necessarily Esri-specific basemap)

ArcGIS Server endpoint at DAS GEO may be set up to help work towards this this goal

Some resources:

   * Geospatial Enterprise Office FIT page: http://gis.oregon.gov/DAS/EISPD/GEO/fit/FIT.shtml
   * Web Services provided by GEO
         o GEO Services & Applications page: http://gis.oregon.gov/DAS/EISPD/GEO/geoServices.shtml
         o ArcGIS Server REST Endpoint: http://navigator.state.or.us/ArcGIS/rest/services

Contacts:

   * Milt Hill, Oregon FIT coordinator