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September 2000 - The beginning of the Gateway
 What is the Lighthouse Project?
Agriculture is undergoing a technology revolution. Computers, the Internet,
Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and portable
computing devices are rapidly becoming essential technologies for many
agricultural producers. Farmers get their weather reports, monitor futures
prices, map their fields, monitor water efficiency, and order supplies all
using computer and Internet technologies. Even more important than in the past,
providing conservation assistance
to farmers, ranchers, and other USDA customers in the new Millennium requires
rapid and efficient access to natural resource data.
NRCS in cooperation with Microsoft, Compaq, and ESRI is
looking at new ways to deliver and support the data needs of our 3000 field
offices, 13,000 employees, and thousands of public customers who rely on USDA
resource information. With the intent to build a “proof-of-concept”, the
Lighthouse Project brings together three ongoing Business Process Reengineering
(BPR) projects to manage and deliver large scale, enterprise data from USDA and
other Federal data providers using commercial off-the-shelf technology. These
three USDA projects include Geospatial Data Gateway (“Gateway”), Customer Service
Toolkit (“Toolkit”), and Soils Data Viewer (“SDV”).
The vision of the Gateway is to provide easy access and
delivery of geospatial environmental data to internal and external customers
including the general public. Our goal is to deliver data to anyone, anywhere,
anytime. Prior to creating the Gateway, customers would visit many web
sites, make telephone calls to numerous data centers, and wait days or weeks to
get their information. Many users give up along the way. Today the data is
distributed across many servers, many data centers, in different parts of the
country, and managed by different organizations. Providing one access and
delivery portal is critical to timely and efficient delivery of data in this
“at the speed of Light” or web-time era.
To evaluate the success of the Lighthouse Project, two mission critical applications were
included as part of the project. These applications were specifically chosen to
represent the business case where Gateway data is consumed and used by field
level, Windows NT hosted applications and the business case where Gateway
services support web based clients needing access to geospatial data.The
Toolkit is a collection of software tools for USDA field employees who work
with the public (primarily agricultural producers, farmers and ranchers).
The purpose of the tools is to help natural resource planners provide information
to farmers and ranchers that result in conservation on the land. Custom
software tools incorporate commercial software products such as SQL Server,
Outlook, Excel and Access.This enables USDA employees to provide natural resource i
nformation in professional looking documents. Toolkit also provides tools
for mapping and analyzing natural resource information. Maps are a traditional
method of communicating with land managers, and the Toolkit makes it easy to
develop maps for these customers.
The Soil Data Viewer is an Internet application providing online access
to soils information. The NRCS is the federal agency responsible for mapping
soils and developing databases of information about soils. Many groups
including farmers and ranchers, state and local governments, universities,
developers, and realtors come to NRCS for soils data.
Traditionally, soils information has been provided on paper, however efforts
are underway across the country to convert this information into electronic
databases. Many soil surveys are being digitized for use with geographic
information systems. The Soil Data Viewer takes advantage of soil surveys that
have been digitized. The tool makes it easy for USDA employees to produce maps
that display soils information, combine soils themes with other geographic
information, and query soil databases for answers to customer questions on how
the soils located in a specific site should be used to conserve the resource
and promote water quality.
What are the Benefits?
- Support more efficient and timely program delivery
- Supply greater quantity and variety of products and services for the customer
- Improved quality of products and services for the customer
- Optimize USDA staff access to resource data and information and encourage
better use and management of data resource
- Strengthen partnerships within government, research organizations, and private sector
What are the basic functions of the Gateway?
Data Selection-Users can find and select data by entering a county,
a place, or online mapping tool. Next, the Gateway will provide for user
selections what resource data is available for the selected area.
Data formatting and Packaging- based on application needs users can specify how
the image, vector, or tabular data is to be formatted or re-projected.
Data Delivery- depending on the telecommunications capabilities and urgency of
the data request, users may select downloading or CD-ROM delivery.
How does it work?
The Geospatial Data Gateway is a e-business like
application whose purpose is to take orders then create and deliver digital
products from distributed data sources. Orders are gathered using a web front
end. The Java client interacts with a geospatial navigation service to identify
their area of interest. This may be an area as large as a state to as small as
a farm field. This navigation service uses ESRI ArcIMS, SDE, and SQL Server
data to facilitate locating the land of interest.
Using server to server communications and XML, images are
retrieved from Microsoft’s Terraserver and merged with other map information to
provide a visual picture of the area of interest.
In the words of Dave Anderson, USDA-NRCS, “..being able to
interactively share geospatial imagery creates very exciting possibilities for
cost effective data delivery.”
USDA has identified over 20 geospatial themes considered
important to carrying out the missions of the USDA. Four themes
have been designated critical to initial GIS implementation. These include (1)
soils, (2) orthophotography, (3) Common Land Units (field boundaries), and (4)
Demographics. In addition, the Gateway
will provide access to plants, climate, hydrography, roads and streams,
wetlands, and numerous other natural resource based themes. While the
Lighthouse Project databases will store only 1.5 terabytes of data using SQL
Server and Compaq’s StorageWorks , the design target will require over 24
terabytes of information. The technical
architecture must also support access to distributed databases.
Once the user locates their area of interest the catalog server provides a list of
geospatial themes and tabular data available for ordering. After selecting what products the users
desires, the user indicates what format and delivery method is to be used.
Users may order CD’s or choose to download their products immediately. Once the
order is logged and acknowledged, a brokering process sends an XML message to
remote data sources requesting the appropriate geospatial products. Depending
on the size of the products and delivery method, products are either forwarded
to the Gateway packaging service or stored on the remote data provider’s local
FTP server. Order status, availability, and pick-up location is communicated to
the customer using e-mail.
In summary, the Gateway simply offers a single access
point to the data, allowing the user to browse through what is available,
choose only the area that is needed, order it in the desired projection and
format, and have it automatically delivered. It is hoped the Gateway will
provide better service for less cost by automating many of the manual processes
associated with natural resource data delivery. The Gateway is to provide an
Internet based solution for One Stop Shopping for natural resource
or environmental data.
The Web Soil Data Viewer technical architecture is
implemented through the use of ESRI ArcIMS, ESRI Spatial Data Engine (SDE), SQL
Server, and COM+. Client browser data requests and data services to and from IIS,
Active Server Pages (ASP) are implemented with XML. The Web SDV for
rendering application content with Internet Explorer 5.0 uses DHTML and Behaviors.
The Web SDV relies on three databases to provide real-time creation of user
selected interpretive soil maps and reports. Custom developed COM+ DLLs
integrate the soil geo-spatial data with relational soil data contained in
two separate SQL Server databases. The user interface menus and options,
business rules to process data, and predefined SQL query statements are
implemented in a third SQL Server database which is accessed at run-time by the
web based application. The output is a customized soil interpretation map and tabular report.
Success
Leveraging local and WAN networks in an architecture based on loosely coupled services and
databases, the Lighthouse Project applications (Gateway, Toolkit, and SDV)
together provide an efficient and manageable infrastructure, users easy access
to data, and USDA an efficient data delivery system. Using almost anyone’s standards
this represents success.
Project Solution
Target Customer
Government, Agribusiness
Architecture
3 Compaq ProLiant 8500 Windows 2000 -based servers for SQL Server, IIS, ESRI
ArcIMS and custom application servers; 1 Compaq Proliant ProLiant 1850 for
authentication management; 1.5 Terabyte Compaq StorageWorks
Software Used
• Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Microsoft Office 2000
• Microsoft Com+
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x
• Microsoft Visual Basic® 6.0
• Microsoft Visual Studio® 6.0
• Microsoft Visual SourceSafe™ 6.0
• Microsoft Visio 2000™
• ESRI ArcIMS
• ESRI Spatial Data Engine
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