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Director General,Survey of Israel haim@mapi.gov.il The data source of the National GIS was based on triangulated aerial photographs, taken at 40,000 ft altitude, using analytical and digital photogrammetry. The current revision cycle is 3-4 years except roads and orthophoto which are revised annually. The National GIS of the SOI consists of a topographic data base including ten topographic layers: orthophoto, elevations, roads, buildings, hydrographic features etc., a cadastral database including blocks and plans, and a database of addresses. The National GIS infrastructure consists of the infrastructure of the Survey of Israel and many government offices as well as medium and large cities and towns, utility companies and public organizations. Orthophoto production and data collection is carried out by the private sector. This is the main trend, and Israeli companies provide integrated geospatial services for satellite imagery, orthophotography, mapping, GIS, cadastre, visualization tools and more. The usual mode of cooperation between the SOI and the private sector is that SOI defines the specifications; private companies carry out the data collection and the staff of the SOI does quality control and integration of the data into the National GIS. Then, the SOI provides data and services directly to the end users. THE GEOSPATIAL PORTAL Around a year ago SOI launched National Geospatial Portal (NGP). This portal has been developed in cooperation with the Inter-agency Committee for SDI. The portal is already working. It is part of the e-Government initiative and will serve simultaneously as a geospatial portal for the public and a governmental GIS clearing house. For the time being it serves the public free of charge. Following a thorough analysis of the options, the decision was made to build a geospatial data warehouse at the first stage, in order to improve the quality control of data. This approach was adopted because of the variety of data sources. Though the quality of data covered in the National GIS is very good, one cannot assure the quality of uncontrolled data coming from all ministries and agencies; so the integrated applications of the simple end web-user may not meet the expected standards. Following the resolution of the Inter-agency Committee with reference to the national geospatial metadata standard based on ISO19115, this standard was adopted for the portal as well. Meta-data for 400 layers of geospatial data has already been prepared and is accessible in the system. The system works quite fast and passed successfully loading simulations. Potential users are exposed to the portal and are very satisfied with it, including the education community and potential emergency applications. Main objectives The first objective of the portal is to consolidate, to integrate and distribute geospatial data following the e-Government policy of making the data available to the public. The second objective of the portal is to serve as a clearing house of geospatial data between governmental offices and thus to save governmental investment and to improve compatibility and integrativity between governmental offices regarding geospatial and location based applications. The expectation is that the exposure of data will also stimulate processes of improving the quality and precision of the data. Organization  Fig.1:The Online Geospatial Configuration The main components of the system are: data collection, data integration, simple web operational search mechanisms, national geospatial meta-database, data sharing and data distribution mechanisms and a variety of links to GIS and mapping web sites. The architecture of the NGP is based on servers in the SOI, which operate as a Data Warehouse supporting, via intranet, internal users of SOI and distributing the data to an identical environment at the central web site of the government using its services, including security of data. The government site data is distributed to the various government offices including web services and via Fire Wall and the internet to the public. The mode of interaction between the SOI, the government offices and the public is as follows (see figure 1): The SOI collects GIS data of various government offices and public organizations using the coordination of the Inter- Agency Committee for SDI, checks the data and integrates it into the Geospatial Data Warehouse of the Portal. The public (the web users) can either query the NGP directly for pure geospatial subjects, or access via the government portal, a portal of a government office for a complicated issue. The portal of the government office will integrate its internal IT and GIS data extracted by the NGP using API (Application Programming Interface), see figure 2.  Fig.2:A Model of Integration between the National Geospatial Portal and the Organization Portal The core of the National Geospatial Portal is a Geospatial Data Warehouse that includes more than 120 layers of geospatial data collected by governmental organizations, thirty of which are from the SOI. The Portal represents data with great variability and richness that enable the system to sort the layers under main topics and the user to extract relevant metadata. The portal is integrative and the data includes many topics, such as basic mapping (roads, buildings, addresses, orthophoto, contours, hydrology, institutes, various scales of raster topographic layers etc.), layers of cadastre and planning (blocks, plots, town plans, master plans, land reserves, etc.), tourist information (national resorts, national parks, hiking trails, forests, woods, parking areas, etc.), administrative boundaries, transportation, infrastructure, security and national emergencies. The portal enables simultaneous presentation of multiple layers of information, with high cartographic fit, linked to attribute information in various formats according to the spatial entities. In addition based on the general data in the system, there are engines that enable links to other databases, that might give specific information in special operative applications in the future, for internal governmental usage. The functionality of the portal As mentioned above, the portal's concept allows its operation by any user, professional, or layman, from various disciplines. With this principle in mind the tools are divided into two sets: standard tools, which are presented on the main screen, and advanced tools that are not presented to unskilled users. In addition, the portal includes an external interface to other operation systems (general and flexible API with parameters). User interface allows simple as well as sophisticated modes of operation. The metadata component in the geospatial portal The metadata is an important component in the geospatial portal. The development of the portal is progressing in accordance with the ripening of the Israeli national geographic metadata standard, as a component of the National GIS standards. These processes are taking place in SOI as a result of the activities of the Inter-Agency Committee for SDI. The new metadata standard was approved and adopted by the committee. The development of the metadata component is based on ISO 19115, and was constructed in a way that will enable its direct feeding to ARC CATALOG (An ESRI product), but will be observed (in Hebrew) similarly to other portal components on commonly used web computers/terminals. All the information in the portal is accessible to the public, with no limitation or a need of passwords or permits. The metadata search engine of the portal can search through 400 layers of GIS of countrywide coverage, or of national interest, in spite of the fact that the information included in the portal includes only a quarter of these layers. The rest of the layers are not ready for presentation for various reasons: homeland security, intellectual property, privacy and lack of updated data. CONCLUDING REMARKS Following the current trend, the future of National Mapping Agencies will be based on online services both to the general public and to other government and public organizations. This refers to geodetic services based on satellite permanent stations (combining GPS, GLONASS and GALILEO) both for horizontal and vertical references. It refers to coordinate based cadastral framework, databases and computerized archives as well as supporting control of cadastral mutations based on the permanent stations. This refers also to geospatial databases including rectified imagery (either from aerial photographs, or satellite images), topographic data, addresses and more. The data integrated in GIS should be accessible through the web, through geospatial portals, either free of charge, or selectively accessible due to security, or payment policies. The geospatial data should be accessible to government agencies for integration with the IT infrastructure for integrated web services through web portals. A special attention should be paid to the use of geospatial information by portals of learning geography for the full range between kindergartens and university graduates. These activities should be taken care of by partnership between the government and the private market. The government should define the vision, the goals, the specifications and supply budgets if necessary, while the private sector should be the contractors and sometimes also promote initiatives. Page 1 of 1
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