Forestry Application

The Solutions

1. Community of Practice

The NFIS community of practice involves 14 autonomous jurisdictions: the federal government, 10 provincial governments and three territorial governments. Each jurisdiction has its own way of collecting, storing and disseminating data.

To ensure participation from the community of practice, there had to be a minimal impact on current daily operations. Each community had to be able to supply current data to the NFIS without changing the way it does business.

To accomplish this, NFIS adopted a standards-based, web service approach, requiring each community group to supply information to NFIS through web services. This allows the community to maintain the data as each group sees fit, and supply an interface that can be used by others in the global community. Due to the geographic nature of forestry data, NFIS adopted the Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC) standards early in the process, and participated with the CGDI in its efforts to adopt OGC specifications. Using OGC-based standards, NFIS was able to meet the needs of its community of practice as well as contribute to the global geographic information society.

For more details, click, NFIS warehouse.

2. Metadata

Each community in the forestry community of practice has data holdings it wanted to make available to other members of the community of practice and beyond. The goal was to build an infrastructure for the creation and access of metadata based on the Federal Geographic Data Committee’s Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (FGDC CSGDM).

To accomplish this, the NFIS community of practice adheres to the following principles for consistent metadata:

• Use the CGDI-endorsed FDGC CSDGM as the metadata standard.
• Use the GeoConnections Discovery Portal as search engine for NFIS holdings.

By using the GeoConnections Discovery Portal to search geospatial holdings, NFIS benefits from its exposure to the geospatial community. The GeoConnections Discovery Portal provides tools for creating metadata records, a storage facility for the metadata, and a search engine for discovery. It also allows existing metadata repositories to be registered and makes their information available through the Z39.50 protocol. New and existing metadata is easily handled through the GeoConnections Discovery Portal.