.

Geoinformatics_05-2009
article a starting point than a conclusion. there were also some comments on this, mainly from the industry, which is more focused on acting now rather than looking at solutions tomorrow. politics is slow to respond to market initiatives, some say. and they add that inspire alone is not enough. public accessibility and an awareness of the use and necessity of data portals are as important as the creation of the portals themselves. also, what the public can do with the data should be clear. there s clearly still a lot of work to be done in the field of global spatial data infrastructures. eric van rees evanrees@geoinformatics.com is editor in chief of geoinformatics. for more information on gsdi 11, papers etc. have a look at www.gsdi.org/gsdi11. column geospatial portals - keys to success geospatial portals are becoming more mainstream these days with the introduction of data.gov in the united states and inspire in the european union. one of the biggest issue with these geoportals is findability. most people are used to just going to google, typing in a text search and then getting their results. works really well doesn t it? but we all know that when it comes to doing textual searches on spatial data, we get really poor results because text isn t spatial. metadata could be the solution, but depending on how it is written, the search engine could misinterpret it and give the user a poor result. that is why most new geoportals integrate maps so that users can at least zoom into the area of interest and then narrow it down with tags and other methods. this usually gets the user interacting with datasets they want, but it is only the beginning of the journey. one huge gap in these geoportals is their inability to offer up data in formats people want (open formats) versus ensuring the data is online. first off trying to defining open formats is difficult enough. gml might be very open, but how many people can actually use it? dwg is much more closed, but autodesk users rely on it to get their work done. that tradeoff between such formats can determine how successful a geoportal is. giving power users the ability to work with raw data, but still giving casual users the ability to work with the spatial data is a balancing game. caching is also important. many early geoportals allowed data providers to register their local web services with them, but didn t do anything to ensure the data would be available. caching reduces the load on these data providers by ensuring fast, consistent access to web services, but still keeping the management of those web services with the provider. even just providing uptime results next to datasets or web services to show users how often data is available would help reduce unhappy users because they would be able to see how healthy web services are and plan accordingly. who wants to build web applications on a web service that is down even 1% of the time? geoportals are doing a great job helping users locate spatial data sources, but holding users hands to the download of the dataset ensures that they will be happy. users running up against data formats that they can t read or understand, web services that aren t available and not being able to find a dataset in their area of interest are all ways to ensure that users won t be coming back. simple solutions to these problems is all that is needed to make every user satisfied, reducing the workload on everyone. james fee james.fee@rsparch.com is geospatial manager at rsp architects ltd. have a look at his blog www.spatiallyadjusted.com 34 july/august 2009
Powered by fluidbook tm