Web Feature Service for Government Units and Population of the Northeast US

Under this award, CIESIN collaborated with IONIC Enterprise in

establishing a Web Feature Service (WFS) to serve Government Unit (GU) Framework data

and selected data from the U.S. Census of Population for 8 northeastern States: Connecticut,

Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Jersey, and New

York. This corresponds to the geographic area of the Northeast Information Node (NIN) of

the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). In particular, the WFS provides

access to GU Framework data for states, counties, and census tracts derived from the

Census Bureau's Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER)

system, specifically the 108th Congressional District Census 2000 TIGER/Line files. These

boundary data were linked with the Demographic Profile data available for states, counties,

and census tracts, which include nearly 100 variables on population and housing, including

age structure, race, household composition, and housing occupancy and tenure.

G. Yetman and M. Becker of CIESIN and R. Fetters of IONIC attended the kickoff session

in Denver CO on 28-29 September 2004 (expenses shared with CIESIN's NBII project).

Since then, G. Yetman has participated in regular Category 5 telecons led by D. Nebert.

After the formal award, CIESIN issued a subcontract to IONIC Enterprise in conformance

with the original proposed budget and Statement of Work. As part of the agreement, IONIC

has provided a perpetual license to RedSpider and waived the first year of maintenance,

which constituted a matching contribution of more than $23,000.

CIESIN acquired all the relevant GU framework data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census

along with the corresponding Census 2000 Summary Tape File 3 data. CIESIN ordered,

received, and installed the Sun server as part of the NBII NIN. 150 gigabytes of storage has

been made available to the project on a Storage Area Network (SAN) unit donated by the

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

IONIC Enterprise led the development of an Oracle-based database schema compliant with

the draft INCITS-L1 standard for Government Unit Boundaries. Unfortunately, the draft

standard did change significantly during the course of the project (from gubs.xsd developed

by Paul Daisey to the final framework schema GovernmentalUnits_GML3L0r11.xsd). As a

result, CIESIN requested and received a no-cost extension of the project to 15 November

2005. At that point, the standard had stabilized, but CIESIN and IONIC had limited time in

which to conduct final implementation and testing of the WFS itself.