Geographic Information System (GIS) Metadata Portal Website Migration

Saturday, October 29, 2011
Hall 1-2 (San Jose Convention Center)
Alan Hanesana , Computing, Electronics and Networking Technology, Honolulu Community College, Honolulu, HI
David Askov , Pacific Disaster Center, Kihei, HI
Richard Nezelek , Pacific Disaster Center, Kihei, HI
The Geographic Information System (GIS) metadata portal website at Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) in Kihei, Hawaii, provides online geospatial and natural-disaster data to the public. PDC currently serves more than 2,400 metadata records to users, both locally and worldwide. The existing GIS metadata portal website, the Global Hazards Information Network (GHIN), uses a software backend that has been deprecated by the vendor and will no longer be supported beyond the current release. Our goal is to migrate the legacy GHIN metadata search-and-retrieval website to a modern Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) portal environment. The new portal server must support International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) metadata profiles. Also, data cataloging and harvesting must be compliant with standard Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) CS-W 2.0.2 or Z39.50 protocols. User account mechanisms for authentication, access, and security should be handled by Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), and users role can contribute, review, rate, and comment on individual metadata. Two candidate software frameworks, Geonetwork Opensource and Geoportal Server were set up and evaluated against our requirements. For greatest compatibility with PDC’s existing Esri ArcGIS, ArcSDE, Postgresql, OpenDS, Microsoft Exchange, UNIX system, we selected Geoportal Server 1.1.1 as the new SDI implementation. The Geoportal Server will be installed on Apache Tomcat 6, configured eXtensible Markup Language (XML) properties, and modified JavaServer Pages, JavaScript, HTML as needed. The newly implemented Geoportal Server will ensure that users worldwide can more easily discover and access PDC’s full archive of geospatial data, services, and products.