Open Standards for Parcel Data? Yes Please...

The Carbon Project's FGDC CAP grant report on the development of an Implementation Model for sharing Parcel data has been completed. The review document is available at the FGDC Cadastral Subcommittee site.

The draft model conforms to the FGDC Cadastral Data Standard and is implemented as simple Geography Markup Language (GML). It also includes instructions for accessing Parcel GML with WFS, ArcGIS, Gaia and mobile apps.

 

The intent of Parcel GML is to help Parcel data sharing among local, state, tribal, federal and private organizations - and we welcome your feedback!

 

- Jeff

The Carbon Project Deploys Cloud-based Open Data Platform

 

I'm pleased to announce that The Carbon Project has deployed a cloud-based open data platform for sharing transportation data between local, regional and state organizations under a project with the Eastern Carolina Council of Governments (ECCOG) that was funded by the National Spatial Data Infrastructure Cooperative Agreements Program (NSDI CAP).

The deployment provides an easy-to-use platform so local data stewards can upload and translate their data on North Carolina streets and roads into a common information model.  To date, street data from over 80 counties in North Carolina has been uploaded using the Carbon ‘Transformer’.

The Carbon Transformer allows local government spatial data stewards to maintain their transportation data in its native format, to meet their business needs, while also sharing it with State and Federal agencies who need data in a common format.  This allows State and Federal agencies to aggregate contributions from many sources in seamless statewide and national products.

The NSDI CAP is funded by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and administered by the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) to help form partnerships among organizations to implement the components of the NSDI.

The Carbon Transformer is part of The Carbon Project’s new cloud-based open data platform, CarbonCloud Plus+.  CarbonCloud Plus+ supports a wide variety of mapping information, and enables development of seamless, open data based on standards from regional organizations, states, the FGDC and others.

For more information, or to learn how you can get involved, please contact info@thecarbonproject.com.

- Jeff

GEOINT Source Management and Interoperability

In today's world knowledge about the Earth and the activities on it rarely comes from one source, and it's constantly changing…  Military personnel need to work in collaboration with coalition partners and non-government organizations.  In addition, there are growing crowd-sourcing and geojournalism communities adding updates every day.  In this environment easy-to-use source management, colloration and interoperability tools are vital.

Meeting these challenges requires new approaches, and this week The Carbon Project will be unveiling CarbonCloud Plus+ ... a new platform for geospatial data ingest and management.  CarbonCloud Plus+ uploads, transforms, streams and synchronizes geospatial updates using GEOINT data services - capturing open source, co-producer, in-house and crowd source updates and making them easy to access and update.  Existing data files can also be easily added to GEOINT services for use by non-GIS professionals - and update by mobile Geo-apps.

The CarbonCloud Plus+ platform uses interoperability standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) supported by most GIS vendors, including Esri.  The platform also easily integrates with existing GIS processes - so it's interoperable and works with existing GIS (best of both worlds).   It can also be deployed on a standalone server or used from the Microsoft Azure Cloud, further reducing costs.

Able to work with many types of GEOINT, including Foundation Data, Geonames, Human Geography and OpenStreetMap, CarbonCloud Plus+ enables seamless integration with civilian, federal, commercial and international organizations.  Easy-to-use and cost-effective, CarbonCloud Plus+ is designed to meet the multi-source GEOINT ingest and management needs of today and the future.  Follow me on Twitter @JeffHarrison for more updates throughout the week...

- Jeff                                  

Carbon Project Selected to Advance Parcel Data Interoperability

 

The Carbon Project today announced it was selected by the 2012 National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) Cooperative Agreement Program (CAP) to help develop open standards for parcel data exchange. 

The effort will assist in the deployment of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) endorsed Cadastral Data Content Standard for the National Spatial Data Infrastructure. The objective of the project is to develop an implementation model for parcel data using open standards, including Geography Markup Language (GML) from the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC).

As background, there’s growing interest in assembling 'seamless' statewide and federal parcel data sets that can be shared among government agencies, tribal interests, academia and the private sector.  Our goal in this project is to make it easier for these organizations to share their parcel data using open standards for interoperability.

Project partners include Fairview Industries, The Carbon Project, representatives from state governments and the FGDC.

The NSDI CAP was established by the FGDC to help form partnerships to implement the NSDI. The United States NSDI includes the technology, policies, criteria, standards and people to promote geospatial information sharing throughout all levels of government, the private and non-profit sectors, and academia.

For more information on the FGDC-endorsed Cadastral Data Content Standard for the National Spatial Data Infrastructure click here.

For more information or to learn how organizations can participate, please contact info@thecarbonproject.com or visit www.TheCarbonProject.com.

- Jeff

Carbon Project Selected to Provide Cloud-based Data Interoperability

The Carbon Project today announced it was selected to provide cloud-based tools to support mapping data interoperability under a project with the Eastern Carolina Council of Governments (ECCOG). 

The effort will engage local, regional and state organizations to exchange transportation data, transform it into a seamless statewide ‘Roads’ layer and assess the potential for collaborative data maintenance in the future.

“The time for mapping data interoperability is now, and some of the best information comes from local governments,” says Jeff Harrison, CEO of The Carbon Project. “Our goal is to make it easy for local governments to exchange their mapping data with state governments, federal partners and other users.”

The Carbon Project’s cloud-based data interoperability platform supports a wide variety of mapping information, and enables development of seamless, open data based on standards from regional organizations, states, the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) and others.

For more information please contact info@thecarbonproject.com or visit www.TheCarbonProject.com.

About The Carbon Project

The Carbon Project is a high-energy software and technology company pioneering cloud computing, Geosocial Networking, and peer-to-peer solutions to solve tomorrow's infrastructure, environmental and national security mapping challenges. We serve businesses, software developers and government agencies that need real-time mapping solutions, or simply use geospatial data. The Carbon Project is a privately owned company backed by individual investors. For more information please visit www.TheCarbonProject.com.

The Carbon Project and Geosocial Networking® are registered trademarks of Carbon Project, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their owners.

Carbon Project Demos Mobile App for Updating Geonames

The Carbon Project recently demonstrated our Android app that makes updating geographic names easy – and it’s based on open standards for interoperability.

In the demo we showed how the CarbonCloud app lets Android users propose updates to over 2.5 million geographic names. The app works by letting users get geonames for any area of the United States - and if they see a needed update they can submit it with just a few clicks.  Updates are sent to the CarbonCloud Sync service (and can be reviewed if needed). The app service can also send the updates out to many online services at the same time – thanks to open standards from OGC like WFS-G and GeoSynchronization. This is unlike many systems today which store data in just one database. The demo above uses WFS-G provided by CubeWerx and geonames data from the US Geological Survey.

We also sent the app out to beta testers who were able to load it and get started immediately (without consulting any of the app user guides - which a good test for the average user. I mean, who really reads directions for an app anyway ;-).  Some of the beta testers comments included -  

- 'Easy and intuitive navigation of the map' 

- 'Creating a new feature was easy and fairly intuitive' 

- 'Overall,  a very neat app'

  

Let us know if you want to give it a try.

- Jeff

GEOINT 2011 Tech Talk Discusses the Rise of Geospatial Collaboration

I travelled to San Antonio recently for GEOINT 2011 - a fantastic event that attracted over 4,400 attendees, exhibitors and leadership from the defense, intelligence and homeland security communities. During the Symposium I had a chance to present at the GEOINT 2011 Tech Talks and highlight the potential of 'GeoSynchronization and Geospatial Enterprise Collaboration'.

The Carbon Project's Tech Talk focused on how knowledge about the Earth and the activities on it rarely comes from one source, the movement to geospatial crowd-sourcing and the need for 'geospatial enterprises' to collaborate and share in real-time. To meet these challenges we highlighted four GEOINT collaboration scenarios based on GeoSynchronization and emerging OGC standards -

- Mobile Geo-Apps for Android that put the power of GEOINT into the hands of users.
- Using CarbonCloud Sync to 'Plug and Play' with any OGC WFS service in seconds.
- 'Initializing' online services with open Geodata Bulk Transfer (GBT) GML tools.
- Sharing automatic updates from GIS using our 'SDE Watcher' for ESRI databases.

I even had the chance to pull our Android 'GeoSync' app out of my pocket and show how we were connecting to three different services live, including WFS from CubeWerx ;-). Check it out on GEOINTv.

- Jeff