USGIN: INTEROPERABLE GEOSCIENCE DATA SERVICES ON THE WEB—HOW DO WE GET THERE?

The Geoscience Information Network (USGIN) is defined by a collection of service specifications, best practices, registered resources, and reference implementations to enable interoperable web services for geoscience information. Our goal is to provide a framework that will enable applications constructed to accept data input using standard web service interfaces to work with any server that provides data using a known interface. Data providers (e.g. geological surveys) can then publish information by implementing web services without having to simultaneously devote resources to developing client applications to utilize the information. Once a service implementation is in place, addition of content provided by the service is straightforward. Key components of the network are the service specifications, servers and clients implementing the specifications to provide and utilize content, and catalog services that enable users to locate and utilize network resources. The USGIN project is working on implementing reference server implementations for Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC) Catalog Service for the Web (CSW), georeferenced map-image delivery using OGC Web Map Service (WMS), and GeoSciML-encoded geologic map data using Web Feature Service (WFS). Wherever possible, we are using existing free-open source projects to avoid duplicating development effort, and to keep the cost of implementation as low as possible. The idea is that the reference implementations may be used as templates for other data providers. At the same time we are developing or working with collaborators on CSW clients (USGS Science Base client, GEON portal client, CatalogConnector, ArcGIS client) to provide access to catalog services. Most GIS software packages already function well as WMS clients. An ArcGIS client for GeoSciML WFS will load data into an NCGMP09 geodatabase (see Haugarud et al. and Thom et al., in this volume) for client-side utilization. As the reference implementations and client software mature, our focus for these services will shift to development of tutorials and workshops to assist others to bring new data online.