Summary

The Geospatial Technology and Applications Center (GTAC) provides support to a wide variety of land and resource management needs across the Agency. GTAC is a leader in the use of emerging geospatial technologies and providing solutions to inform Agency decision making. Also, GTAC is engaged in all segments of the definition, implementation and operation of these solutions. Furthermore, GTAC strives to ensure the Agency is continuously applying the most up to date geospatial science and technology to address the most important land and resource management issues faced today. GTAC’s on-site contracted staff are an essential part of the GTAC team that accomplishes this work.

GTAC seeks to support Great American Outdoor Act (GAOA) efforts in web mapping support. Xentity was contracted to work with USFS staff and demonstrate our approach to this solicitation.

Problem and Solution

National Forests are public lands and their management requires efficient and effective communication and coordination with the public. Web tools represent the most efficient and accessible method for the agency to broadcast information to diverse public audiences, to engage stakeholders in active participation in National Forest management, and to host a forum for constructive collaboration. 

Beyond these core needs to accomplish the Forest Service mission, web applications also provide new opportunities to engage new communities of recreationists, ranchers, outdoor educators and local collaborative groups. Because natural resource management depends fundamentally on maps to allocate resources and identify priorities, geospatial web tools represent a pivotal technology for the Forest Service to share information broadly and efficiently, not only with the public, but also within targeted communities and across the agency itself. 

As the premier center of excellence for geospatial web applications, GTAC leverages this innovative technology with authoritative enterprise data to serve a variety of needs across the agency.

Solution

Xentity designed, developed and implemented spatial applications that provide viewing and analytical capabilities to diverse and distributed project teams. Our team also leveraged best practices to optimize and publish prepared map documents as map services. Furthermore, Xentity consulted with GTAC and integrated diverse data sources to design and develop geospatial web services for GTAC that support GAOA’s needs and requirements. This included feature services, image services, geoprocessing services, map services, print services and an online publishing to service catalog.

Outcome and Benefit

Xentity helped deliver geospatial tools, applications, products and services for the Great American Outdoors Act mission. Also, our geospatial web service optimization helped address caching. Also, symbolization, data connection, raster connection, database content tuning, infrastructure tuning and load testing design. Our efforts in developing geospatial web services allowed the ability to publish in ArcGIS for Server and be made available securely to a wide variety of users. Also, custom image services can now be hosted locally. Furthermore, they can now distribute well-designed analytical services to their users. Also, Xentity published high-performing map services. Finally, our team leveraged common practices to publish and maintain a catalog of enterprise map services.