The U. S. and Canada just completed a one-year demonstration project to create a distributed framework data resource that spans international borders and connects more than a dozen regional, State, Federal, Provincial and other types of organizations. Most of the achievements were planned, but several unanticipated benefits came out of this activity as well. First, we're finding that the regional partnerships continue to grow despite an end in the project funding. Second, and perhaps more significant, the ocean-science community is engaging on the national scale that extends well beyond the Gulf of Maine. Indeed, a culture change seems to be underway that will have important implications for our nation's response to recommendations from the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy. This all started with a joint FGDC and GeoConnections grant that catalyzed activities in the Gulf of Maine region, building upon the years of effort at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and related developments in the NSDI and the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure. Two organizations led the charge: GoMOOS, the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (www.gomoos.org), in the U. S., and DM Solutions Group (www.dmsolutions.ca) in Canada.
Living Proofs of Concept
GoMOOS hosts all three of the following sites (see www.gomoos.org for more info):
- GoMMaP – The Gulf of Maine Mapping Portal (GoMMaP) is a single point of access to a wide range of informative maps of the Gulf of Maine. The site relies upon the OGC Web Mapping Service (WMS) to integrate data from 16 different organizations, and the list is growing. This truly dynamic and distributed data-map resource is one of the two primary deliverables that came out of the FGDC/GeoConnections project (see www.gommap.org).
- Gulfwatch – For more than a decade, scientists from Canada and the U.S. have been monitoring environmental contaminants found in mussels around the Gulf of Maine. Until this year, the data resided only in spreadsheets. The FGDC/GeoConnections project turned these data into a practical dynamic web-mapping application that with mapping and graphing tools – the maps integrate the contaminant information with other relevant environmental conditions supplied by GoMMaP partners. (see www.gomoos.org).
- OpenIOOS – GoMOOS and DM Solutions leveraged the achievements above to help the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA), the Office of Naval Research and the NOAA Coastal Services Center to spread the success to the rest of the U.S. coastal science community. The resulting Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) is a fully distributed, real-time, OGC-compliant data-aggregation tool. This site goes one step farther by using the OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) to merge data with satellite imagery. (see www.openioos.org).