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COINAtlantic: Sharing through open tools and open standardsJeff McKenna 1 , Andrew Sherin 2 , Alexi Baccardax Westcott 2 & Paul Boudreau 31 Gateway Geomatics, Lunenburg, NS, Canadajmckenna@gatewaygeomatics.com2 Atlantic Coastal Zone Information Steering Committee Secretariata.sherin@dal.ca,aczisc@dal.ca3 International Ocean Institute Canadapboudreau@dal.caAbstractCoastal mapping and related decision makers often need to leverage geospatial information from many differentsources and many different regions all around the world. Current economic realities also prevent many coastal decisionmakers from investing in purchasing high cost datasets and licenses to share and publish this information. TheOpen Geospatial Consortium and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation are supporting standards and software thatallow organizations to easily share their spatial information. Popular Internet search engines such as Google are nowalso able to find datasets through these open standards. The Atlantic Coastal Zone Information Steering Committeeare producing tools consistent with its “Chain for Information Access” philosophy to help coastal decision makersleverage these open standards and open software.IntroductionOrganizations all across the world are producing their own coastal information, and outside organizations mustattempt to leverage this external data. Often difficulties exist in knowing what coastal information exists for a specificarea; for example, a region may have an enormous amount of coastal data but external organizations from outsidethe region cannot find that rich dataset. High costs are often associated with purchasing datasets and licenses forsoftware to publish geospatial information. The Atlantic Coastal Zone Information Steering Committee has establishedthe Coastal and Ocean Information Network Atlantic (COINAtlantic), to allow coastal decision makers methodsto easily locate related oceans data with these previously mentioned challenges in mind.Open Standards and Open Source SoftwareIn order to allow organizations to share geospatial information easily today, there are two important groups thatwere formed in the last decade. The Open Geospatial Consortium, or the OGC, is an international group of morethan 420 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities whose common goal is to developstandards for sharing spatial information (OGC, 2011). These standards allow software developers to design theirproducts so that the software is interoperable with other software. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, orOSGeo, was formed in 2006 to develop and promote open tools for sharing spatial information; the term “OpenSource” is used here to refer to software that shares its source code openly. OSGeo supports many software projectsincluding the development of metadata management software such as GeoNetwork, desktop software such as QuantumGIS,and Web mapping software such as OpenLayers.Google Inc.Since the release of its Maps and Earth products in 2005, Google has become a major player in the geospatialrealm. Google users are able to use the Internet to display location maps for regions across the globe. Google botsare also constantly crawling Web sites and domains, and adding the results to their powerful search database.120
11 th International Symposium for GIS and Computer Cartography for Coastal Zones ManagementCOINAtlantic philosophyThe COINAtlantic Chain for Information Access is the philosophy underpinning the development of theCOINAtlantic spatial tools, and can be described as a five step process. The goal of this process is to provide toolsthat allow users with little technical knowledge, and only a computer with internet, to access spatial information,data and maps. COINAtlantic has achieved success in this through development of the COINAtlantic GeocontentGenerator, and the COINAtlantic Search Utility which address each of the steps in the chain. One of the mostsubstantial barriers to improving success in this approach is to improve the initial availability of products in step oneof the chain: Geospatial information in web mapping services (WMS) or Keyhole Markup Language (KML) formatthat is distributed using standard OGC techniques. The ACZISC and COINAtlantic play an ongoing role in workingwith members and other relevant organizations to make this type of information available and open for use on theInternet. When metadata text is embedded in the WMS and KML files (step 2) and the metadata text is then indexedby search engines such as Google (step 3) it is then ready for searching through the COINAtlantic Search Utility,(step 4) a web interface. The COINAtlantic Search Utility then allows the user to view, overlay, and outputinformation, with processing a function planned for the future (step 5).COINAtlantic Geocontent GeneratorDeveloped in 2012 through a partnership between the Atlantic Coastal Zone Information Steering Committee andGateway Geomatics, the COINAtlantic Geocontent Generator, or the CGG, aims to leverage Google's powerful indexingability, by allowing coastal data managers to generate metadata to describe their services, and then makethese metadata available to Google. The CGG is a simple interface on the Internet, located at coinatlantic.ca/cgg,that allows a user to input a description of their project, publication, organization or data service, and then point tothe region on a map. Online mapping is done through the Open Source Geospatial Foundation's OpenLayers Webmapping software. The Open Geospatial Consortium's KML specification (OGC, 2008) is used to store the metadataand spatial extents of the information entered by the user, which is then easily searchable through Google's searchengine. The end result is that coastal decision makers can use the Google search engine to locate oceans data forregions all around the world. The COINAtlantic CGG encompasses the first three steps in the COINAtlantic Chainfor Information Access for KML files described above.COINAtlantic Search UtilityDeveloped in 2013 through a partnership between the Atlantic Coastal Zone Information Steering Committee andGateway Geomatics, the latest version of the COINAtlantic Search Utility, or the CSU, aims to allow coastal decisionmakers to search for geospatial data through Google and then display the results in one single interface (Figure1). The CSU interface is located at coinatlantic.ca/csu and provides a search tool that will use the Google SearchAPI to crawl its index for related spatial data. The CSU will search for data located on the Internet that uses theOGC's KML and Web Map Service (WMS) standards; the WMS standard allows data managers to publish andshare images of their data, without any physical transfer of the data (OGC, 2002). Online mapping is done throughthe Open Source Geospatial Foundation's OpenLayers Web mapping software. The end result is that coastal decisionmakers can use one single interface to discover and display oceans data from all around the globe. The COINAtlanticCSU encompasses the last two steps in the COINAtlantic Chain for Information Access for WMS and KML filesdescribed above.User responseResponse to the COINAtlantic tools at training sessions in 2012 included a wide range of feedback. These trainingsessions included the CGG and CSU, however, only the first version of the CSU was available at the time whichdoes not include searching with Google or adding KML files. Feedback included general contentment with toolsbecause of the relative ease of use. Issues included application bugs (to be worked out in future versions) or loadingissues (which could be an issue with the WMS servers that participants were trying to connect to). There were manycomments on possible additions/ improvements to the applications, some of which may not be possible to accomplishwithin the ‘Chain for Information Access’ context and others that will be useful when funds for updated ver-121
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CoastGIS Conference 2013: Monitorin
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Sponsors
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Steering Committee Secretariat main
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Santos Basin, BrazilA.F. Romero, R.
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Coastline development and associate
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Visual resource management system f
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11 th International Symposium for G
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Use of Terrestrial-LiDAR for quanti
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Community beach monitoring: utilisi
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Data policy implications arising fr
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Global ocean observing system for w
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ResultsMetadata11 th International
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Coastal vulnerability index to glob
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generating probabilities contours f
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maps, the most critical conditions
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Statistical and spatial toolbox for
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Global oceans and marine planning
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Analysis11 th International Symposi
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Building scenarios and visualizatio
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The African Coastal and Marine Atla
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Methods11 th International Symposiu
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Methods11 th International Symposiu
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Long-term continuous observations o
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Comparing endmember extraction meth
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Integration of scientific data as a
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Conclusions11 th International Symp
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