Online Atlas of Ocean and Great Lakes Offers Downloadable Data

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Thursday, July 24. 2008

Online Atlas of Ocean and Great Lakes Offers Downloadable Data

From a press release from the state of New York, emphasis mine:

Under the auspices of the New York Ocean and Great Lakes Ecosystem Conservation Council, Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Pete Grannis and Secretary of State Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez today announced the launch of the New York Ocean and Great Lakes Atlas, which allows the public to incorporate hundreds of data sets of New York State's resources into an internet-based atlas.

...
The atlas is an online mapping program that makes it possible to download data into Google Earth Geographic Information System (GIS) software. Currently, more than 200 data sets that contain information on such resources as storm drains, wetland boundaries, underwater vegetation, park locations, and fisheries are available through the atlas. Eventually, more than 900 datasets will be included. The atlas can be accessed at WWW.NYOGLATLAS.ORG .

The data can also be downloaded in shapefile and MapInfo formats. I wonder why if the vision is that users will want to view the data layers in Google Earth, the Council opted to build an atlas on other technology. I can't tell which technology is in use, in a quick look, but it certainly is not as flashy as Google Maps/Earth.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg at 06:00 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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the atlas app appears to be a WMS, but i can't find a handle to their capabilities...the front end seems to be a ColdFusion/AJAX thing which has (thus far) been successful in hiding the WMS server url from me.

#1 jesse crossley on 2008-07-24 11:19 (Reply)

Adena,
Thank you for covering the Press Release that announced the release of the New York Ocean and Great Lakes Ecosystem Conservation Council's (Council, www.nyoglecc.org ) Ocean & Great Lakes Atlas (Atlas). The public release of this application fulfills requirement #4 in Section 14-0111 of Article 14 of New York's Environmental Conservation Law known as the New York Ocean and Great Lakes Ecosystem Conservation Act (Act) http://www.nyoglecc.org/media/ECL_Article%2014.pdf .

In the Act, requirement #4 states in part, "...make information available to the public and decision makers;". In meeting this obligation the Council's Technical Working Group decided to build on an exisiting application rather than reinventing the wheel. New York's Office of Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure Coordination was gracious enough to give us the code to their online orthophotgraphy application, built using MapXtreme and Cold Fusion. We were fortunate enough to secure the services of the original application developers to build in functionality that the Technical Working Group determined would provide the most utility with what we were provided.

The Council's Technical Working Group felt that we should provide the two data formats that are available on the New York State GIS Clearinghouse, MapInfo tab file and ESRI shapefile, so that "...decision makers..." and their staffs could access the data for analytical purposes. The Working Group also directed that all data collected should be provided in KML format so that "...the public..." could have access to the data through an open source format, usable in multiple mapping applications such as GoogleEarth.

The Council views this Atlas as an interim step to providing access to data for facilitating Ecosystem-based Management. The Technical Working Group is working on developing a draft strategy vision document that plots out the future of the Atlas. The Techincal Working Group is very excited about incorporating the newest and best in geospatial technology data delivery and analysis into future iterations of the Atlas.

Once again, thank you for spreading the word about the Atlas.

Regards, Jeff Herter

Jeffrey L. Herter
Ecosystem-based Management
Research & Development Project Manager
New York Ocean & Great Lakes
Ecosystem Conservation Council
(518) 486 - 7942
jeff.herter@dos.state.ny.us

#2 Jeffrey L. Herter (Link) on 2008-07-24 14:12 (Reply)

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