Go-Geo! The Go–Geo! Portal A service for those concerned about the 'where' as much as the 'what' JISC Conference 2005 Dr David Medyckyj-Scott Research.

Go-Geo!

The Go–Geo! Portal

A service for those concerned about the 'where' as much as the 'what'

JISC Conference 2005

Dr David Medyckyj-ScottResearch and Geo-data Services Manager

EDINA National Data Centre

http://www.gogeo.ac.uk

Geospatial data – there’s a lot of it about

• Geospatial data

a class of data that describes the earth

Geospatial data – there’s a lot of it about

• Geospatial data

a class of data that describes the earth

• “80% of business and government data is geospatial”

• “vast quantities of geospatial data available in government, academia and business”

– e.g. Digimap: 300,000 data files downloaded in last 6 months

• various EU directives and legislation require such data to be made accessible by public bodies inc. universities and shared more widely

• “geotechnology is one of the three most important emerging and evolving fields, along with nano-technology and biotechnology” US Dept of Labour 2003

Simplified workflow

Discover

Locate

Access

Use

Publish

Go-Geo!

GIS and geospatial related

applications

Fit for purpose?

The vision - a GI Portal which…

• promotes greater awareness of geospatial data within tertiary education– increasing amounts of geospatial data being created

– existence is not publicised

– need to help make more (effective) use of these data

• promotes greater awareness of geospatial data within the wider GI community in the UK

• facilitates understanding of the problem space: provides access to geographically related resources

a geographically-oriented access point to the JISC IE

Go-Geo! history

• developed collaboratively with UK Data Archive• a long history…

– 2000-2001: scoping study establishment of a Z39.50 compliant resource discovery tool for geospatial data for UK academia

– 2002–2003: development of a demonstrator suitable for extension to full service and proof of concept

* January 2003, an exit strategy produced

– 2003–2004: * develop portal to roll out a service

* trial with user community

* technical development

* parallel metadata promotion initiative (UKDA)

Go-Geo! – History & current status

• JISC funding ceased at end of July 2004• EDINA took on running of Go-Geo! service for 1

year• JISC have since funded

– some development work (phase 4a)– a project to promote and encourage geospatial

metadata creation within UK tertiary education (phase 4b)

• situation will be reviewed this August

• use of the portal is growing…

Other IEContent Providers

Go-Geo! portal

architectureGeo-data Network

Network

Geo-data Gateway

Metadata or resource servers

Metadata

Related resources

Searching for geographically related resources

Directly geo-referenced

Mixture of directly & indirectly geo-referencedinformation

Advanced search

Results listing

A record

Comparing coverage

Searching for images

Resource channels

Online Geospatial Services

Courses and training

Technical highlights

Searching• using Z39.50, the portal undertakes simultaneous

searching by cross searching a number of databases (catalogues) and resources

• support for GEO Profile– GEO servers must support the Bib-1 and GILS Attribute Sets

to a limited extent • indexes created by harvesting and parsing documents

allows topic and geographic relevance ranking• a WSRP portlet which can be plugged into other portals

A geographic search capability• interoperating with geoXwalk, a geographic semantic web

service, means the ‘different geography’ problem can be solved

?

geoXwalkServer

Content Provider C

ContentProvider A

ContentProvider B

Coordinate footprints

Parish names

Place names

Place: L34 0HS

‘Find resources for this postcode’

Knowsley

340900,392300 - 347217, 397660

BX003

The ‘different geography’ problem

Go-Geo! Portal

Technical highlights (cont.)

• A Metadata Standard– a Tertiary Educational Profile for geospatial metadata

description – based upon ISO19115 information metadata standard, – cross-mapped to a range of relevant standards– records retrieved from targets are mapped to the profile

for display to users e.g. from DDI

• A Metadata Creation Tool– A XML based web application for creating, editing and

managing versions of metadata records

Recent and ongoing developments

• a WSRP portlet which can be plugged into other portals

• exposed Go-Geo! as a virtual catalogue within the national, government funded, GIgateway service

• investigated extending the portal to be a e-science GRID portal for GI sciences

• now working on user customisation and investigating utility of enquiry organisational folders (EOFs)

Searching for people (demonstrator)

Go-Geo! Phase 4b project

• 18 month (Feb 2004 - July 2006) initiative

• aims to promote and encourage geospatial metadata creation within UK tertiary education

• undertake workshops and promotional activities and co-ordinate metadata creation, collection and quality assurances

• carry out a pilot study with 4 universities to establish a business model for metadata creation and maintenance based on the use of Go-Geo! resources as local data management tools

• technical developments

– implementation of an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Catalogue server interface on to Go-Geo! to ensure compliance with the ISO 19115 Metadata standard

– rollout of online metadata editor tool

• provide guidance to JISC for others areas in which metadata is an important resource

Simplified workflow

Discover

Locate

Access

Use

Publish

Go-Geo!

GIS and related geospatial

applications

Fit for purpose?

Data access mechanisms

• a link within the metadata record to an online ordering service

• user is taken to the data via a link to some online service

– data extraction function e.g. UKBORDERS

– interactive viewing clients e.g. Digimap

• the user may be directed to a repository from which the data can be extracted and downloaded

• the user may be able to automatically ‘mine’ the data from a remote, online data source

– data is delivered to some type of web client where it can visualised and possibly analysed

Let’s look at an example….

JISC Interoperability demonstrator project

• prove the feasibility of delivering geospatial data using OGC standards

• demonstrate ease of use and value added

• build support and enthusiasm for further development

• stimulate and advance further thinking, and

• identify major hurdles in full development

Project Outputs

• using a range of OGC/ISO 19000 based web services (WMS, WFS, WCS) and

• a basic annotation web service (XIMA)

• produce a series of demonstrator clients to illustrate– access to data

– a teaching focussed use case (Metosat data in teaching weather forecasting)

– a research focussed use case (based on dynamic image registration using web services)

• a report on the utility and issues surrounding implementation of open standards for geospatial data within the JISC IIE

Remote access via web services

Web Services

Geo

-D

ata

Web Services

Geo

-D

ata

Web Services

Geo

-D

ata

University College,London

Demis,Netherlands

Globe,Colorado

Web Services

Geo

-D

ata

MIMAS,Manchester

Web Services

Geo

-D

ata

EDINA,Edinburgh

Web Services

Geo

-D

ata

IONIC,Belgium

MetadataMapsData

Map Viewer

Data extraction

Issues and challenges

• creation of metadata is still an issue but not as big as it once was

• we need to go beyond metadata to data access but problematic– policies and mechanisms required which promote open data

sharing* formal geospatial data repositories or do we formalise the

informal mechanisms?

* is the data in a state that it can be shared?

– digital rights and copyright a big worry

• looking for resources to add to Go-Geo!– majority of information within JISC IE is not geo-referenced

and thus ‘not’ searchable geographically

• JISC IIE interoperability standards ≠ GI interoperability standards

• sustainability and income streams

Contact details

Dr David Medyckyj-ScottManager, Research and Geo-Data Services Email: [email protected]

Tel.: +44 (0)131 650 3302Fax: +44 (0)131 650 3308

EDINA web site: http://edina.ac.uk

Go-Geo!: www.gogeo.ac.uk

Portlet: http://www.gogeo.ac.uk/PortletInfo.html

GIgateway: http://www.gigateway.org.uk/