Managing and Distributing Geospatial Data at NGDC

Author: John Cartwright
Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder

Campus Box 216
Boulder, CO 80309-0216
USA

Phone: 303-497-6284
Fax: 303-497-6513
jcartwright@ngdc.noaa.gov

Advances in Internet technology have made it easy to "publish" data and have dramatically shortened the time line from data collection to distribution. However, the challenge now lies in meaningful presentation of this data.

At NGDC, we need to serve heterogeneous data hosted on a distributed network of machines. This data must be presented in multiple "views," often integrating different data sets in the display. GIS and Web clients are being used to access this data, which resides in SDE and traditional RDBMSs. The database is used not only for retrieval, but also as a tool to facilitate data QA/QC and the generation of metadata.