Federated GeoData powering the future of GIS

We’ve come a long way in the development and usage of data standards. I’ve personally been working over the last few years to push the adoption of formats like GeoRSS and OpenSearch-Geo. These have been baked deeply into any project or product that we’ve developed. Mapufacture’s original purpose was to promote GeoRSS by providing a catalog and tools to use the format that was meaningful to users. GeoPress adds GeoRSS and OpenSearch to WordPress, and Mapstraction added GeoRSS to the various mapping API’s before they supported it.

Our GeoIQ platform has these built in from the ground-up. Every dataset uploaded into GeoCommons is available as GeoRSS, KML, CSV, Shapefile, Atom, SQLite and more. Users are able to easily publish data in a variety of formats that make it consumable and shareable across all types of applications and integrations. In addition, you can search any GeoIQ server using OpenSearch-Geo and OpenSearch-Time and get results as KML, Atom, JSON, or HTML. Again, putting power into the user without them having to worry about the complexities of the format.

Kate featured how users can use OpenSearch in their web browser for quick searching. You can even use OpenSearch in Windows 7. We’ll be releasing some tools soon to connect GeoCommons and GeoIQ into even more of your tools.

GeoIQ uses OpenSearch to federate data between any server. All of our clients can easily perform a single search to get results back from any of their GeoIQ nodes or from GeoCommons. In the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting a few of our clients that will be sharing out some amazing data with their communities and everyone using this capability.

Just recently, Esri built in the ability to search GeoCommons from their GeoPortal tools. You can try it out. Many of the Esri portals can now leverage the tens of thousansds of datasets the GeoCommons community has helped find and share with the world. Similarly, like GeoIQ federates data between each other, they can search and pull in data from OpenSearch servers such as Esri, GeoNetwork and others.

It’s great to see the world of GIS leveraging these formats to connect specialized users into global communities. Spatial analysts can leverage business data and individuals and organizations can similarly use powerful and easy to use tools such as GeoIQ to pull in GIS data for their intelligence. In GIS, this is often referred to as an SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure) – which like many acronyms and titles has brought to mean many different things to people. But really what it means is the ability to connect data and leverage distributed data and capabilities across many platforms.

Ping us if you have OpenSearch enabled services you would like to connect into GeoCommons or use GeoCommons in your search services. We’re excited to be a major connector on the growing GeoWeb.