An Interoperable Transportation Framework Data Service

Abstract

Heterogeneous geospatial data systems have been developed in the past decades. National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) was proposed and utilized to share these heterogeneous systems through interoperable solutions. As one of the first set of data sharing approaches, Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) identified seven sets of data themes as framework data and developed relevant content standard for sharing these datasets. Together with other NSDI initiatives, a transportation framework data service is described in this paper to share our experience gained through the building of transportation framework service at different aspects: 1) the datasets are described through FGDC compliant metadata and categorized in a data searching engine supporting Z39.50; 2) the datasets are served through Web Feature Service (WFS) and could be accessed through standardized service for content updating and accessing; and 3) the WFS was chained with an in- house development on mapping WFS as Web Mapping Service (WMS) to provide web mapping, therefore, leverage the vast amount of deployed WMS clients in the last years.