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Jerry Johnston, US Department of the Interior

June 20, 2016

Next Generation Open Data Platforms

What’s New and What’s Next?

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) followed• Tens of thousands of datasets registered to shared catalogs

…Now what?

…Or maybe the right question is:

So what?

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

NSDI Strategic Plan GoalsNSDI Strategic Plan (FY14–FY16)

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 stakeholders

• We 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

Why GeoPlatform.gov?

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

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

• Provide robust infrastructure for hosting these services where needed

• Assess, measure, and monitor data and service quality

• Make 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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What We’ve Accomplished in the 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

Towards 5★ Open Services

From 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

a 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 who wish to integrate and tailor this reusable service for their

needs.

• 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

• Shared cloud hosting of data and applications for our users and on behalf of our agency partners

GeoPlatform Today

• 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

• A-16 NGDA Theme Communities

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

• Federal Agency Communities:

• GeoCONOPS

• WWHGD

• New Communities

Communities

• 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

• Browse harvested AGOL maps by search filters or organization

• Create map galleries with maps from WMV and AGOL

• Share maps and galleries through 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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• Tools to measure,

monitor, and

report on NGDAs

and services

• NGDA Dataset

Lifecycle Maturity

Assessment

survey tools

• Service Checker

Performance Dashboard

Performance Dashboard–Reliability

Reliability of USGS National Structures Service

What We Are Planning for the 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 status of services

• Expansion of shared Cloud (AWS) hosting offering

• 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 GeoPlatform ecosystem

Achieve the High-Performance Web Services Experience from Cloud…

Data assets

Service assets

Layer assets

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 can continuously monitor the component services of the distributed NSDI

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