Participating with OneGeology: Experience, Lessons Learned and Other Tidbits

I recently had the opportunity to "stand up" a WMS representing a 1:5,000,000 scale geologic map of North America for integration into a platform called OneGeology.




OneGeology, whos mission statement is to:

"Make web-accessible the best available geological map data worldwide at a scale of about 1: 1 million, as a geological survey contribution to the International Year of Planet Earth." (see: http://onegeology.org/what_is/mission.html)

 aims to:

• create dynamic digital geological map data for the world.
• make existing geological map data accessible in whatever digital format is available in each country. The target scale is 1:1 million but the project will be pragmatic and accept a range of scales and the best available data.
• transfer know-how to those who need it, adopting an approach that recognises that different nations have differing abilities to participate.
• the initiative is truly multilateral and multinational and will be carried out under the umbrella of several global organisations.   (see:  http://onegeology.org/what_is/objective.html)

The process for contributing to this worthy effort was pretty interesting and I wanted to share this experience a bit.

To begin with, the map we were submitting was actually a replacement for an existing geologic map of North America which only covered the southern portion.  The previous WMS was served using Map Server while our new one was being powered with ArcGIS Server 9.3.1.  This was quite the test for AGS given the outstanding performance of Map Server with regard to WMS serving.  In an effort to boost performance without doing a bunch of map authoring and data processing, we performed a couple of interesting tricks that I outlined in some detail in a previous post.

Basically, participation with the OneGeology platform can occur at several tiers, each basically correlated to functionality.  Our participation was of the first tier, that being simply contributing a WMS.  This experience was not trivial.  Even though WMS is technically a "standard," there is still enough wiggle in the spec that a specific implementation is needed to ensure interoperability.  The folks at OneGeology have done a outstanding job with this and have documented, in detail, requirements for how WMS services need to be configured for integration into their system.  Our specific instances are here:

http://certmapper.cr.usgs.gov/arcgis/rest/services/one_geology_wms/USGS_Geologic_Map_of_North_America/MapServer -- raster one

http://certmapper.cr.usgs.gov/arcgis/rest/services/one_geology_wms/USGS_Geologic_Map_of_North_America_GFI/MapServer -- vector one for getFeatureInfo requests only

And finally the portal.  It is a really nice application and serves as a great demonstration of "mashing up" distributed data services that originate throughout the globe.  It is really pretty astonishing, given the wide range of participating organizations.

OneGeology Portal Depicting Geologic Map of North America