Enabling Use of Government Tabular Data in a Geographic Context

U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee 2009 CAP Grant, Category 4

FGDC Cap Grant, Category 4

• Easy and productive access to geographic, tabular government data

• Reference location by Address, Code, or Coordinates

• Shared Public Web Service

• Discoverable, Accessible, and Applicable to geographic contexts

Project Goals

• Enable more data to be consumable in a geographic context

• Increases in geo-enabled data will cause an increase in demand for geographic applications and education

• Geo-enabled data creates a positive externality for the entire ecosystem of agencies and companies that leverage or provide geospatial technologies

• Mapping should be an option for every data work flow when there is a geographic component available (80-90% of the time)

• Make data available to a variety of workflows (spreadsheet data to GIS and GeoWeb) and provide dynamic loops (GIS data back to spreadsheets and GeoWeb) allow for collaboration and data sharing

Proposed Solution

• Deliver a platform to provide easy georeferencing of non-spatial data

• Quality Assurance and Error identification and remediation of contributed datasets

• Catalog and store taxonomy of existing boundary data sources

• Add OGC Catalog Services for the Web (CSW) support

CAP Added Capabilities

• GeoCoding Engine for Street Address georeferencing

• GeoJoin Engine for polygonal region georeferencing

• Spatial, hierarchical aggregation

• Federated search and discovery

• OpenSearch and GeoRSS

• OGC Catalog Services for the Web (CSW)

GeoCommons Architecture

Finder! Maker!

Web Services API

Data Store

Core

AnalysisEngine

Search

GeoJoinEngine

GeoJoinEngine

File Parsers

GeoCoding Engine

GeoCoding Engine

GeoCoding Engine

• Modularized Architecture

• US Address Parsing module

• US TIGER/Line Database and importer

• Replaceable components

• Open-SourceGeoCoding EngineGeoCoding Engine

Web Service API

Address String Parser

Street Database

Ruby

SQLite

GeoReferencing Engine

• Stored GeoCommons boundary definitions

• Integration with existing georeferencing services

• Join imported data with any GeoCommons dataset

GeoReferencing Process

Data Sharing

Data Attributes

Data Description with Metadata Standards

• FGDC• ISO 19115• Microformat

s• Meta• Hyperlinks

Data Sharing with Common, Open Standards

• KML• Shapefile• CSV• Atom• JSON

•WFS• Spatialite

Export data for GIS workflows (shapefile)

Export data for non-geographic workflows (.csv)

Export data to 3D Globes (.kml)

Data Findability

Geospatial Federated Search Search

Geospatial Federated Search Search

Candidate Datasets

•FedStats

•Recovery.gov

•Grants.gov

Thank you