The document discusses the evolution and future of open data platforms like GeoPlatform.gov, which implements goals of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure Strategic Plan. Key points include: - GeoPlatform.gov provides a consistent portal for open geospatial data and services, and shared hosting of these resources. - Recent improvements include new map viewers, analytics dashboards, and tools for data discovery, sharing, and collaboration. - Future plans include expanding data registries, monitoring service quality, and providing more open APIs to developers. - The overall aim is to advance open data sharing and make national geospatial resources more accessible, interoperable, and usable.

1. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Jerry Johnston, US Department of the Interior
June 20, 2016
Next Generation Open Data Platforms
What’s New and What’s Next?

2. A (Very) Brief History of the US NSDI
• Executive Order 12906 (1994) called for the establishment of
the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI)
• Defined as the “technologies, policies, and people necessary to
promote sharing of geospatial data throughout all levels of
government, the private and non-profit sectors, and the academic
community”
• Goals include reducing duplication and costs, while making more
geographic information available to the public and partners in
government and the private sector
• Standards development and registries (Geospatial One Stop,
Data.gov) followed
• Tens of thousands of datasets registered to shared catalogs

3. …Now what?

4. …Or maybe the right question is:
So what?

5. The Need for a New Strategy
• The role of government in the geospatial ecosystem has
changed
• Use of geospatial data and maps in the public sector is
pervasive
• Some significant challenges to address:
• Past approaches have not allowed for significant collaboration
among partners in the NSDI or users of data/services/maps
• Making sure it all “works” when you need it to (e.g., service
availability and quality)
• We have (mostly) made metadata for people to read…not
machines

6. NSDI Strategic Plan GoalsNSDI Strategic Plan (FY14–FY16)

7. What Is GeoPlatform.gov?
• Implements key objectives of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI)
Strategic Plan, and the National Geospatial Data Asset (NGDA) Management Plan
• Consistent, reliable portal to nation’s vast ecosystem of open geospatial
data/services
• Means for our stakeholders to publish their content once and have it accessed from
anywhere
• A services platform for providing direct access to the nation’s online geospatial
resources
• Single point of access for finding data assets, services, layers and maps
• Provides shared hosting services for our stakeholders
• We deal with the tough IT challenges: consistent access, reliability, scalability, and
performance
• Shared core application services for stakeholder collaboration (e.g., building shared
map galleries for a community of interest)
A concerted effort to share open geospatial data and technology

8. Why GeoPlatform.gov?
• Reduce costs of producing, managing,
and sharing authoritative open data
• Move towards interoperable web
services to provision all “nationally
significant” data
• Provide robust infrastructure for
hosting these services where needed
• Assess, measure, and monitor data
and service quality
• Make data and maps more usable
through shared knowledge
• Enhance platform services and
facilitate access to nation’s geospatial
resources for developers
8

9. What We’ve Accomplished in the Past 18 Months
• Building out core services for our SaaS/PaaS
• Building better tools for managing our assets
• Laying foundations for secure, reliable, scalable, hardened
services in the Cloud
• Starting to make it easier for people to find the right resources for
the right task
• Building and testing core services for developers to access
platform for open data and open services
Towards high-performance web services for core geospatial assets (NGDA)
• Dashboards
• Asset Registries
• Map Viewers
• Shared Maps
• Web Service APIs

10. Towards 5★ Open Services
From open data sharing towards an open services experience
Level of Openness Description Benefits
★
Proprietary service is available on the web through a
licensed (for fee), non-standard interface
O.K. It's nice to have service on the web, however, the licensed and proprietary
nature of the interface hinders interoperability and widespread adoption.
★★
Proprietary service is available on the web through a
publicly available, non-standard interface
Splendid! It's great to have a publicly available service on the web, however, the
proprietary nature of the interface hinders interoperability and widespread
adoption.
★★★
Service is available on the web through a publicly
available, candidate open standard interface (i.e., a
new standard with public support and tangible adoption)
Excellent! The barriers to interoperability have been lowered by the use of a
candidate open standard. (This stage is a necessary step in evolving the platform
and getting others to use it.)
★★★★
Service is available on the web through a publicly
available, open standard interface
Wonderful! The barriers to interoperability have been greatly reduced by the use of
a well-established, adopted open standard, from a credible standards organization
like W3C or OGC.
★★★★★
Open source service is available on the web through a
publicly available, open standard interface
Brilliant! Not only is the service open and interoperable, but its source code is
available for those who wish to integrate and tailor this reusable service for their
needs.

11. • What’s New:
• Look and feel
• Additional map viewer functionality
• Create and import maps from Esri’s
ArcGIS Online
• Create and embed Map Galleries
into external sites
• Portfolio management capabilities to
measure and manage national
geospatial data assets
• Enriched geospatial marketplace
• Secure scalable Amazon Web
Services Cloud infrastructure
• Shared cloud hosting of data and
applications for our users and on
behalf of our agency partners
GeoPlatform Today

12. • GeoPlatform Marketplace
• Quickly post and easily
search for planned data
acquisitions
• Publish and find planned
data collection projects
• Expand opportunities to
partner on data
acquisitions (reducing
costs and duplicate
efforts)
• Initial implementation
supports USGS 3D
Elevation Program
Investment Efficiency

13. • A-16 NGDA Theme
Communities
• NGDA Collaboration
Community (NCC)
expanded from the Theme
Lead Collaboration
Community
• Federal Agency
Communities:
• GeoCONOPS
• WWHGD
• New Communities
Communities

14. • Multiple data browse, filter, and
sort features
• Dataset preview
• Add user content: Digitize
features or Upload .KML,
GeoJSON, .csv, or shapefiles
(in .zip) to extract features
• Gazetteer and Geolocation
support
• Control layer ordering, visibility,
opacity
• Save and share maps (Web
Map Context)
• Publish composed maps
Web Map Viewer

15. • Browse harvested AGOL
maps by search filters or
organization
• Create map galleries with
maps from WMV and AGOL
• Share maps and galleries
through email
• Embed map blocks and
curated gallery pages into
other websites
• Customize gallery page with
community and keywords
• Manage gallery pages
• Permissions-based access
and use
Map Manager
15

16. • Tools to measure,
monitor, and
report on NGDAs
and services
• NGDA Dataset
Lifecycle Maturity
Assessment
survey tools
• Service Checker
Performance Dashboard

17. Performance Dashboard–Reliability
Reliability of USGS National Structures Service

18. What We Are Planning for the Next 12 Months
• Implementing Registry+, our new central hub for finding and using
significant GeoPlatform/NSDI resources
• Plan to greatly enhance discovery
• A unified registry for core GeoPlatform business objects
• Fixing logical consistency (schema, syntax), semantic consistency, and
access issues in our metadata holdings
• Improving capabilities for monitoring and tracking status of services
• Expansion of shared Cloud (AWS) hosting offering
• After rigorous testing and trials, start to roll out open service hooks for
developers
• Want developers implementing and contributing back open source
components that leverage and extend the GeoPlatform ecosystem
Achieve the High-Performance Web Services Experience from Cloud…
Data assets
Service assets
Layer assets

19. Conclusion
GeoPlatform is helping advance the NSDI by enabling users to:
• More easily find existing maps and data: Semantic search/Knowledge
graphs will help users surface the right content more quickly and easily
• Get access to more high-quality NSDI services: Cloud hosting
offerings have the ability to change the game in terms of making high-
quality data available
• Understand (and improve!) the quality of the NSDI services: Service
status checker and performance dashboard can continuously monitor the
component services of the distributed NSDI
• More easily share data, tools, and maps and collaborate: GeoPlatform
offerings bring collaboration and analytics tools at scale to end users in all
sectors