Open Source Geospatial software for the the Army Corps of Engineers

Wetlands Regulatory program

FOSS4G2007Victoria, B.C. Canada

Michael Smith

Engineer Research & Development Center Remote Sensing/GIS CenterUS Army Corps of Engineers, Hanover, NHmichael.smith@erdc.usace.army.mil

Task: Revise Regulatory Software

Geospatial InputGeospatial IntelligenceComplex formsMany Business RulesNational Upward Reporting / Geospatial

Reports

Business Requirements

Account/password management for thousands of users

Strictly Defined Roles and Access

Remote Data Centers (run by people we’ve never met on machines we’ve never seen)

24x7 Systems with Fail-Over/Disaster Recovery

Oracle standby servers and load-balanced apache

24x7x365 DBAs at data centers

ORM1

VB with Oracle data storage (3 stored procedures)

Mapping done via ArcIMS called from VB

3 years development for point spatial storage

$5 M budget

2 Updates in 2 years

District by district deployment

ORM1

ORM1

ORM1 GIS Implementation

USA

CE C

orp

ora

te S

DE/O

racl

e g

eodata

base

OMBIL / ORM

CorpsMap

Dis

tric

t eG

ISCOM

OBJECT EXCHANGE

Analysis

RFMIS

EngLink

ORM Data V&V Process

SDE

Lat/LongPLSSCongressionalCountyWater bodySoil typeHUC

ORM Input Panels

Write to OMBIL

IMS

REMIS

ArcGIS Server Architecture

Few Moving Parts

Apache

MapServer CGIOracle

WebServices

Not that exciting an architecture( but do you really want it exciting? )

Oracle Database backend - all data stored there

Apache frontend

Pl/Sql Stored Procedures - for Business Logic

Oracle Application Express (Web metadata-driven front end)

MapServer provides GIS visualization for web

MapServer provides OGC interoperability (cascading WMS/WFS and integration with ArcGIS)

One of Many (Clients) Approach

Our web interface and MapServer CGI just one method to get at the data

Google Earth (kml from Oracle, wms from MS)

ArcGIS (via SDE, wms, VB.net)

Bentley MicroStation (via ProjectWise)

Others…..

Metadata Driven Development Environment

Apex - more

Application Reports

Activity / Session State Management

ORM2

1 year development (actually around 7 months, 5 months of group meetings on

peoples gripes)

$750K budget

Point / Line / Poly spatial storage

Web front end with Oracle backend (everything in oracle with mapserver cgi)

1 division (5 districts) initial deployment

All remaining districts (except 1) deployed following month

Hardware Platform

HardwareSun Fire 12K / 32 cpu / 32 gb RAM - for Database1 of 40 Oracle Databases (1 gb ram allocated)2 Sun Fire T2000 with Load Balancer / Shared with

3 others Requirements are minimal though Serve 50 (10 concurrent) users with Oracle XE (free)

on a laptop (macbook pro) (in a vm)

Benefits

Very stablesame architecture for 6 years

Scalablesupporting ~ 1350 users, around 500 distinct

users per day, 30-35K page views, 9K map views Oracle XE is free / Apex is included If not XE, your org probably has Oracle already If not, Postgres / PostGIS

Page Views

ORM2 Dashbaord

Full History

On-screen Digitizing

Consume WMS

WMS Services

Spatial Details from Query

Spatial Analyses

Spatial Searches

Spatial Searches - By Address

Google Earth - Export

Google Earth - Import

Presentation from 2004

Build enterprise class applications with unlimited scalability … Oracle runs all the Mission Critical Systems of the Corps Sun or Linux Servers at Agency Data Centers Independent development, testing and production environments Oracle is our primary RDBMS Oracle is our primary application & web development environment Oracle Spatial geometry for application specific and dynamic

geospatial data We use shape files or Oracle for rendering read only/basemap data PL/SQL for domain logic University of Minnesota Map Server for Map Generation Adopt OGC Standards (WMS/WFS) and SOAP/XML RPC Access to

Geospatial Data DMS OWTchart for graphing Refractions OGC->IMS script for ESRI compatibility

Questions?

Versions over the Years

Year ESRI Our Choice

2001 MapObjects ForNet / MapServer 3

2002 ArcView IMS Mapserver 3.5

2003 ArcIMS 3 Mapserver 3.6

2004 ArcIMS 3 Mapserver 4.2

2005 ArcIMS 4 Mapserver 4.6

2006 ArcMap Server Mapserver 4.8

2007 ArcGIS Server Mapserver 4.10 (soon 5)