Our coastal and marine environments are under siege. Population rates along the coast are growing at an unparalleled rate. This narrow fringe we call the coast is home to more than 53% of the nation's population, and its population continues to increase by 3,600 people per day. Decisionmakers are struggling to balance the economic well being of their communities with the need for natural resource protection. All levels of government are becoming increasingly dependent on digital geospatial data to support decision-making. An improved and widely available geospatial data infrastructure is needed to adequately address coastal and marine issues of the 21st century.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has begun to address this challenge. The agency has formed a NOAA GIS Working Group and is exploring the development of an enterprise-wide spatial data framework that will allow us to support and foster geographic information systems (GIS) across the organization. This proposed information technology framework and associated NOAA GIS community will also allow us to manage and distribute geospatial data resources in a more unified and coordinated manner. This organization-wide emphasis on spatial data will allow both internal and external users to easily access data via the Internet. This is not an effort to centralize data in one place, but rather it will unify the agency's data resources using established national and international data and metadata standards. This effort will use new database and mapping technologies to support an organization-wide approach to data management.

This new effort will help position NOAA to be an effective player in the larger Geospatial One-Stop E-Government Project, which is meant to enhance the accessibility, affordability and utility of geospatial information for all levels of government for the benefit of the public. The Geospatial One-Stop is rooted in the President's Management Agenda of August 2001, and is consistent with Office of Management and Budget Circular A-16. The recommendation report from the NOAA GIS Working Group will be completed and forwarded to the NOAA Chief Information Officer in December 2003. Highlights from this report will be presented in this session.

In addition to the NOAA initiative, there has been considerable effort over the past year within NOAA's Ocean Service to develop a cohesive GIS community and develop a new Internet-based portal to access NOS spatial data resources. The NOS Data Explorer has three main tiers in its architecture: Client Interfaces, Application Framework, and Distributed/Remote Data Interfaces. Web-based clients interacting with the system will initiate requests through the Client Interfaces, which pass information into the Application Framework. The Application Framework processes the users requests and operates the Distributed/Remote Data Interfaces through a series of Data Interface Adaptors. The Distributed/Remote Data Interfaces are a toolkit of connections to Remote Data Holdings that execute queries and operations on the interfaces exposed by the remote server.

The Client Interface tier is responsible for providing Connection Points for different client tools. A Connection Point (for the purposes of this system) is identified as a standard communications port and protocol, which accepts requests and responds to clients using one of a number of supported sub-protocols. Connection Points are exposed to the Internet and contain a set of interfaces that translate the statements encapsulated in the sub-protocol into consistent command statements. These commands are then executed against a standard set of functions within the Application Framework. Client tools are Web Browsers and GIS software clients, as well as machine-to-machine tools for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). These client tools each have their own requirements for how they send and receive data from the system and new Connection Points can be crafted around the Application Framework to accommodate any number of client tools.

The Application Framework contains the operations that can be performed against the Remote Data Providers and sets of Data Access Interface Adaptors. The operations of the Application Framework are a series of units of work that can be implemented through a Client Interface. The operations of the Application Framework (to date) are: search by keyword; list data by thematic groupings; list all data; get metadata for layer; render map for an area; and request data delivery. These functions are encapsulated and exposed to users through each of the Client Interface tier Connection Points. Client Interfaces are logically grouped by the type of client tool, and are presented back to the client tool in a fashion consistent with the requirements of the sub-protocol.

The Data Access Interface Adaptors are a toolkit of translation mechanisms. These mechanisms translate the incoming parameters from the Application Framework operations into statements that can be executed against the Remote Data Provider to result in completion whichever unit of work is being requested by the Client Interface.

This separation of interface from underlying functionality follows well-established Object Oriented Programming (OOP) techniques and allows the NOS Data Explorer to be extended to engage different clients and unit of work expansion as the diversity of tools evolves. The NOS Data Explorer Web portal was developed using a suite of commercial-off-the-shelf software tools (ESRI's ArcIMS and ArcSDE) and application development environments (J2EE and JSP/JSTL for Web-UI construction, system flow control, and error handling and JDBC for data source connectivity).

These technologies being implemented within NOAA's Ocean Service have the potential for forming a key component of an enterprise-wide approach to GIS within all of NOAA. A demonstration of the NOS Data Explorer Portal and lessons learned will be shared during this session.