Data Solution Design For the Community for Data Integration

The USGS Community for Data Integration (CDI) is a dynamic community of practice. They work together to grow USGS knowledge and capacity in scientific data and information management and integration. Since 2009, the CDI has been helping to facilitate and address technical, data, and management challenges across several working groups. They contracted Xentity for their knowledge in Geospatial and Open data to complete a “data solution design” project.

Guidance and Coordination on “Save Map As” Project

Back in 2009, the CDI was working on a “Save Map As” project which includes several components to make it easy to save and or move visualization sessions of geospatial web map services from one viewer session in one tool or Application’s Programing Interface (API) to another or to simply re-use for later. The CDI required support for such architecture implementation, including enterprise architecture role support, which includes architecture functions such as advisory, consulting, management, and communications as well as solution architecture consulting to provide highly technical services support to CSS. The major task for this project was EA and SA guidance and coordination on the CDI ‘Save Map As’ project.

As the prime for Architecture and for the National Geospatial Program, Xentity led the support for solution architecting to help define applicable implementation solutions to address transformation objectives defined within the architecture. This included the development of JSON context reading standards the USGS can use. The development included the reading JSON cross-domains to handle cross-domain scripting, SQL injection, and other JSON/AJAX type security issues. We also helped link multiple APIs across viewers, initially starting with the National Map Viewer to call other APIs. This included establishing test labs for the National Geospatial Program (NGP) and analyzing, evaluating, and providing test showcases for web tools for downloading framework commerce analysis from the USGS Store and TNM Download framework on CartoDB (HTML5, JS, CSS3). These Web 2.0 development solutions went live in 2010. 

Newly Implemented Standards

The results of these activities moved CDI towards a Web Application Framework. This supported the creation of an OGC Web Context standard that was released in 2016. Furthermore, the aforementioned “save as…” standard has been implemented in ESRI ArcGIS Online. The CDI is now capable of taking the output of a session in one specific standard and then export that output to multiple formats with the “save as” framework designed, developed and deployed. This also provides easier access to mapping files. Thus allowing a network of sharing and communication, easing the burden of future projects.