Over most of the next year, the State Cartographers Office will be working on two grant-supported projects designed to develop several cutting-edge applications.
The first, a ten-month project, will develop an educational website allowing users to visualize and interact with views of coastal erosion constructed from relevant GIS and remotely sensed data. The project, which will focus on Lake Michigan bluff recession in Ozaukee County, will attempt to present a blend of scientific data and coastal imagery using a variety of visualization approaches. The visualization system developed through this grant will allow Internet users to explore data sets, digital imagery, and terrain models in an integrated system. The goal is to deliver a site of value to both the general public and local decision makers.
Project involves many partners
The SCO will coordinate the management of the project with direction from Mark Harrower, an Assistant Professor at the UW-Madison, whose academic interests include GIS, cartography, remote sensing, and the presentation of data through electronic visualization techniques. Other participants in this project include the OzaukeeCounty Land Information Office, the Ozaukee County Planning and Land Management Department, the UW-Madison Sea Grant Program, and the States Coastal Management Program in the WI Dept. Of Administration. Jeff Stone, a Masters student in Geography, was recently hired to perform the technical work on the project.
Grant funds for this project were provided by the Institute for the Application of Geospatial Technology (IAGT) in Auburn, NY. The IAGT makes limited funding available to fourteen northeastern states to develop applications using remote sensing data and technology that is useful to local, regional and tribal governments. The IAGT receives funding for its grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Federal funding supports the second project
The other grant project recently awarded to the SCO is funded by the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) through its annual Cooperative Agreements Program (CAP). CAP funding over the past several has been targeted toward metadata, Clearinghouse, and web mapping projects. The SCO has been awarded several CAP projects over the past decade, the most recent being a metadata training project in 2001.
The goal of the current project is to extend and enhance geospatial data and web mapping discovery through the Wisconsin Land Information Clearinghouse (WISCLINC) website. Updated metadata completed by various organizations from around the state over the last 18 months will be incorporated into WISCLINC with additional information identifying ESRIs ArcIMS- and Open GIS Consortium (OGC)-compliant web mapping services. Web map services (WMS) and web feature services (WFS) identified through the clearinghouse metadata catalog will be viewable through a local clearinghouse map service viewer with statewide reference layers available or through their native originating web mapping site or application.
This expanded functionality will enable a better statewide view of the emerging interoperable web map service infrastructure upon which regional or multi-jurisdictional applications may be built. Users will also better be able to locate local and regional web mapping sites and on-line applications. Finally, at the federal level, OGC-compliant services have been identified as a foundation for the Geospatial One Stop portal project as well as potentially contributing to The National Map and others. Highlighting these services should enable us to explore opportunities to link into and be recognized by these federal implementations.