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FEATURE
The Expanding Role of Location
By Kelli Wiseth
Two hundred years ago, when the vast wilderness referred to in U.S. history books as the "Louisiana Purchase" was acquired from France, the size of the United States effectively doubled overnight. According to Carolyn Walton, executive CIO for the state of Arkansas, "the surveying, charting, and mapping all began in Arkansas. And we're proud of the role our state played in the early days of mapping new territories." With its GeoStor data warehouse, Arkansas is again leading the way into uncharted territory, as the first state to have an enterprise-class system available via the internet for anyone in the world to use for accessing information about Arkansas.
"GeoStor is the first [in the United States] geographic information system (GIS) that is used statewide, accessible by anyone—not just in the state but throughout the world. It's a multivendor, world-class 24/7 enterprise system," says Walton. GeoStor supports many daily activities involved in running the state: everything from improving education to providing critical, up-to-date location information for responding to emergencies and natural disasters. For example, according to Shelby Johnson, geographic information officer (GIO) for the state of Arkansas, GeoStor is being used to identify the location of all education resources in the state and to map that information against school performance metrics, so that policymakers at the Arkansas Department of Education can visualize how educational resources are performing today and plan the future of education in Arkansas.
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GeoStor
GeoStor is a publicly accessible, enterprise-class geospatial information system that is operated for the state of Arkansas by the Arkansas Geographic Information Office (AGIO), a unit of the state's Executive Chief Information Office. Key collaborators in this project include the University of Arkansas' Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST), which implemented the system and supports an array of research and other projects using this system, as well as United States' federal agencies, including the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), a 19-member interagency committee composed of representatives from the Executive Office of the President and Cabinet-level and independent agencies. GeoStor serves as a single source of geospatial data for many state and local agencies and the public, increasing efficiency and ease of access and reducing redundancy.
The system currently holds more than 2 terabytes of vector, image, and grid data. More than 524 seamless, statewide feature classes (themes) have been developed from more than 52,000 individual data files. GeoStor delivers spatial data that can be used, without further modification, in a range of vendor formats as well as in standards-compliant, platform-independent formats developed by the Open GIS Consortium to assure interoperability and extensibility. The GeoStor model is currently being considered for adoption in a number of other states.
Software
Oracle9i Database Enterprise Edition
Oracle Spatial
Oracle Application Server MapViewer
ESRI ArcSDE/ArcIMS/ArcGIS
Intergraph Web Map Enterprise, GeoMedia, and SMMS
Ionic RedSpider Web
MapInfo Corporation MapInfo, MapXtreme, and MapMarker
PCI Geomatics Web Map and GeoMatica
Safe Software Feature Manipulation Engine (FME)
Skyline TerraSuite
Microsoft Windows XP
Sun Microsystems Solaris 9
Hardware
Sun ES 4500 (Enterprise Server 4500)
Sun ES 450 (multiple)
Dell PowerEdge Servers (multiple)
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In short, says ECIO Walton, "GeoStor enables us to share geospatial information with agencies across the state, with companies in the private sector, and with all citizens."
GeoStor Architecture and Standards
GeoStor is the result of a collaborative effort involving many organizations throughout the state of Arkansas, including
the governor's office, the geographic information office, the Arkansas State Land Information Board (SLIB), and the University of Arkansas' Center for Advanced Spatial Technolo-gies (CAST), which developed and supports the system with
the participation of many vendors, including Oracle.
At the heart of GeoStor is a 2-terabyte Oracle9i Database instance and Oracle Spatial (a core component of Enterprise Edition; see "Oracle Spatial 10g"), running on an eight-processor Sun Microsystems ES 4500 with 16 gigabytes of RAM. Tapping into this core data warehouse is an array of middle-tier servers running Linux, Windows 2000/XP, and Solaris and supporting a variety of geospatial client applications and tools, such as Oracle Application Server MapViewer.
The data available through the system comes from a wide range of government and public agencies, and in a variety of formats, which is why it was so vital to have interoperability and support for important standards, such as the Open GIS Consortium's standards. Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC),
is an international industry consortium of 258 companies, government agencies, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geoprocessing specifications. For more information, visit www.opengis.org.
Categories of information include geopolitical (administrative areas and buildings in the state); hydrology (hydro-structure, water, waterways); natural resources, such as animals, climate, plants, and subsurface; physical geography, including elevation, geology, landforms, land use, and soils; and socioeconomic data—agriculture, business, law enforcement, culture, education, elections, health, and population.
Access to the system is available via the internet to anyone with a Web browser (www.cast.uark.edu/cast/geostor), using the GeoSurf client (a Java applet) that provides the front end to GeoStor. Through this interface, users can select the geographical area that interests them in many different ways, including selecting a city or other location, entering coordinates, or simply dragging a bounding box on a map of the state.
For the area selected, users can choose from a list of all possible data layers. In geospatial terminology, a layer is a collection of geometries—geometric representations of shapes of a spatial feature in some coordinate space—having the same attribute set, stored in a geometry column. For example, roads comprise one layer; demographic information comprises another layer. Using GeoStor, you can filter on any number of layers you want, for the specific area selected. In addition to the area of interest, users choose the format in which they want the data ultimately provided (TIF, GIF, or GeoTIFF—TIFF files with geographic data embedded as tags—to name a few).
The GeoStor system not only houses a vast amount of information to users at the state level, but it also participates in many federal projects involving GIS information, such as the Federal Geographic Data Committee's (FGDC) federal mapping project, known as the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).
GeoStor Saves Time and Money
GeoStor supports policy- and decision-making, as well as saving a lot of money for the state. "In the first 18 months of operations," estimates Arkansas GIO Johnson, "we realized over two million dollars in savings for the state of Arkansas" based on amount of time saved. Based on experience and a lot of input from users, Johnson's organization came up with an estimate of 23.5 hours on the average to search for, find, access, and retrieve a GIS file for the area needed and then get it ready to use. "After deploying GeoStor," says Johnson, "that time went to 1.5 hours."
One of the key reasons that time was reduced so significantly is because working with geospatial data in traditional systems is time- and labor-intensive. For example, the typical GIS is map- or file-based: Users download an entire file of a particular area or section of a map, and then work to extract just what they need; conversely, users might have to knit together a multitude of files that might comprise the area of interest.
GeoStor, on the other hand, lets users get just the area they need—the dataset is seamless, thanks to the underlying Oracle database and its Spatial extension, according to W. Frederick Limp, director of University of Arkansas' CAST. "Prior to Oracle Spatial, dealing with, say, a highway that might comprise some 50 files in a file- or map-based system required figuring out that your area of interest was in 50 different files, finding the files, getting the files, and putting it all together." With Oracle, that highway is just a set of records in a table. Furthermore, says Limp, "because Oracle has been designed to get data out quickly, GeoStor is able to just get the records quickly."
Geospatial Information Provides Business Intelligence
GeoStor also provides key competitive benefits to the state of Arkansas in the area of economic development, says ECIO Walton. "Our state is competing with all the other states to attract new businesses. Numerous agencies throughout the state can work together, sharing the information available in GeoStor, to help businesses make good decisions about where to locate or relocate in our state."
For example, according to GIO Johnson, when the Arkansas Department of Economic Development learned that an industrial prospect with a strict list of criteria—distance to transportation, including rail and road, and availability of water, electric, and gas utilities—was in the process of evaluating a site in Arkansas as a new location for its business, the data available through GeoStor was used to pull together labor information, education resources, healthcare resources, and numerous other details, providing a complete package of information within the 24-hour time limit the prospect required. The result was a new business in Osceola, Arkansas—and 500 new jobs in that community, according to Johnson.
The competitive information is an example of the business intelligence (BI) that a GIS can provide, not only in the public sector but in the private sector as well. According to CAST's Limp, geospatial database systems are the "next big thing" in BI, capable of bringing the enterprise an exceptional return on investment and delivering high strategic value. Incorporating geospatial data into enterprise systems is the "low-hanging fruit that's about two inches off the ground" in terms of potential benefits to the bottom line, according to Limp. "Whether in government or in a variety of businesses, implementing geospatial data properly and effectively by merging it with existing enterprise systems—not keeping it separate—can bring huge benefits to any organization, in terms of improving efficiency and reducing costs," says Limp. "It's a huge competitive advantage."
Evolving to Oracle Database 10g
GeoStor was initially built using Oracle8i and is currently running on Oracle9i. It will migrate to Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Application Server 10g to take advantage of several key new capabilities, according to Limp. Specifically, these are native support for raster data, persistent topology (data structures and types for handling a "topology data model"), and the improved MapViewer component of Oracle Application Server 10g.
More important than development advantages, cost savings, and improved efficiency, however, are quality-of-life issues. Because the system provides a single source of truth to various agencies and supports interoperability of all client applications that need to make use of it, the information in the GeoStor data warehouse can be kept absolutely current—a fact that can translate into saved lives. When there's a disaster, for example, says Limp, it's important that all state infrastructure entities be up-to-date—whether a bridge exists or not can mean the difference between life and death for emergency personnel. And, says ECIO Walton, "at the end of the day, it's all about the difference that we can make in the lives of the citizens and businesses in this state."
Kelli Wiseth ( kelli@alameda-tech-lab.com) is technology director at Alameda Tech Lab and Research Center ( alameda-tech-lab.com).
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Oracle Spatial 10g
Oracle provides a completely integrated location platform in its database as well as support for specialized datatypes in its application server and business applications. The Locator feature integrated with every Oracle database supports storage and indexing of basic spatial types (points, lines, and closed areas) and includes the foundation methods and functions needed to manipulate these data types. With Locator, business users can analyze and leverage location relationships in their data and answer questions such as "how many miles is it from warehouse a to customer x?" and "what does the transportation infrastructure look like between these two points?"
Spatial enhancements in Oracle 10g include native support for raster and grid-based data (satellite imagery), support for persistent topology and networks or graphs (streets or utility infrastructures), and a geocoding engine that derives mapable coordinates from addresses for improved business intelligence and customer relationship management. With these features, Oracle Spatial 10g provides the sophisticated infrastructure needed to support enterprise applications in transportation, energy, and utilities while meeting many requirements in emergency response, business analysis, and defense applications. Users that need to visualize the results of their applications can use the MapViewer component of Oracle Application Server 10g to render customized map products over the internet in any current browser.
Find more on Oracle Location technologies at otn.oracle.com/products/spatial.
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