Internet GIS solution for Bermuda’s Environmental Health Department
David Fraser, David Coleman, Y.C. Lee
Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering
University of New Brunswick, P.O. Box 4400
Fredericton, N.B., Canada, E3B 5A3
Tel: (506) 453-4698, Fax: (506) 453-4943
Abstract
Educational institutions have access to gigabytes of spatial information and face several
challenges in providing this information to its campus body, including:
-
Allowing students access to the data in a timely manner;
- Minimizing the number of support requests to its technical staff ;
- Allowing students to access data across different computing platforms; and
- Protecting the data against both unauthorized access and unauthorized use
Service New Brunswick (SNB) and the University of New Brunswick (UNB) signed a Data
Sharing Agreement that would allow UNB's faculty, staff and students access to SNB spatial
data for academic use. This spatial data includes DTMs, digital orthophotos, and digital property
and topographic maps and constitutes over 2 Gigabytes worth of information.
To deliver this information to its campus body, UNB developed a web-site with the following
characteristics:
-
Data download HTML page is not directly accessible from the main page - The user must
click through several information pages, describing the SNB data, before arriving at the data
download page
- Provide tutorials that illustrate, in detail, the procedure necessary to get the data into a GIS
- Provide graphical examples of the SNB datasets
- Allow users to download data using two different methods, a GUI (Web Mapping
Application) method and a non-GUI (HTML/text) method
- Compel users to accept a Conditions of Use agreement and validate the user as a member of
the UNB community before allowing the user to download a dataset.
Introduction
In the spring of 2001, Service New Brunswick (SNB) and the University of New Brunswick
signed a Data Sharing Agreement that would allow UNB's Campus Body (its students,
faculty/staff and researchers) access to SNB spatial data for academic use. SNB is a corporation
owned by the Province of New Brunswick and has several lines of business including providing
land registry and mapping services for the province [SNB, 2001]. The databases included in this
agreement are a Digital Terrain Model, a Digital Topographic, a Softcopy Orthophoto and a
Digital Property Mapping database. With the exception of the Softcopy Orthophoto Database,
these databases cover the entire province of New Brunswick and together all database constitute
over 2 Gigabytes worth of information.
The purpose of this agreement is to facilitate the use of spatial data within the UNB academic
sector, or in other words, to both foster the development of spatial analytical skills within UNB
and support research within its academic sector. Three basic principles of the agreement
include:
-
UNB will be responsible for establishing an effective distribution mechanism for delivering
SNB spatial data files to its campus body; and
- the files obtained under this license be used for any personal or commercial purposes
- UNB Libraries will endeavour to protect and guard the integrity of the spatial data files under
this agreement, and SNB’s interest in them from unauthorized use.
This agreement, together with the Data Liberation Initiative, which allows academic institutions
access to Statistics Canada data files and databases [Statistics Canada, 2001], will provide UNB
with a powerful range of data services for teaching and research..
UNB proponents of the SNB Data Sharing Agreement believed that the most effective way to
make the SNB data available to its campus body was via the Web. This paper describes the Web
system that was developed and is currently being used by UNB to distribute SNB data. Before
this Web system is described, a brief history of Internet Mapping is described followed by a
description of ArcIMS – an Internet Mapping product developed by ESRI.
