GML-powered Weather Hits United States

This week we added the National Weather Service's WFS to our suite of products including CarbonTools PRO, Gaia 3.2, and CarbonArc PRO. In short - the NWS WFS rocks! A sneak peak is above.

What's the NDFD WFS?

The National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) experimental Web Feature Service (WFS) is based on the Open Geospatial Consortium WFS standard and provides the public, government agencies, and commercial enterprises with data from the National Weather Service’s (NWS) digital forecast database. This service provides NWS customers and partners the ability to request NDFD data over the internet and receive the information back in a Geography Markup Language (GML) format which is also a Open Geospatial Consortium standard. The request/response process is made possible by the NDFD WFS server.

Why an NDFD WFS?

The National Weather Service is striving to serve society’s needs for weather information by evolving its services from a text paradigm to one based on making NWS information available quickly, efficiently, and in convenient and understandable forms. The NDFD is one example of this transformation. NDFD WFS takes yet another step towards a digital services era by making NDFD data available for computer to computer transfer and processing.

- Jeff

Echo myPlace Featured on Microsoft Silverlight Home Page

World's Most Powerful OGC SDI Security Framework Demonstrated

A Secure SDI WFS controls access to GML over Galveston in this test

The Carbon Project in collaboration with CubeWerx announces the first demonstration of the world’s most powerful security framework for Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). OGC SDI is a suite of standards used by government agencies around the world to promote digital geospatial data sharing and exploitation.

Secure SDI extensions for The Carbon Project’s CarbonArc PRO on ArcGIS desktop and the free Gaia 3.2 geospatial viewer were demonstrated to members of the Canadian and US governments. The extensions provide unprecedented feature-level security, role-based access control and security by geographic areas in coordination with distributed security frameworks from CubeWerx, a leading provider of spatial data warehousing and OGC-compliant Web services software products. CubeWerx provides a Secure SDI server product (CubeWerx IMS) that acts as a “gatekeeper” and allows access control to OGC SDI resources.

The use of CarbonArc PRO and Gaia through Secured SDI services answers one of the primary challenges in deploying real-world systems based on OGC standards – making sure critical geospatial information goes to the people who are supposed to have it.

Secure SDI provides unprecedented functionality including role-based access control, security by geographic area, feature-level security and security by OGC operations. The technology is an important advancement for the geospatial community and supports framework data, geoscience, climate change, cross-border, critical infrastructure and regulatory SDI.

Secure SDI is vital because OGC standards are strongly influencing development of the national and international SDIs, especially data access and collaborative production operations. But these efforts have reached the point where broad acceptance depends on securing online data resources including access control to OGC data services. These requirements will increase as simple data access transition into collaborative data management based on standards like the Web Feature Server-Transactional (WFS-T) from OGC.

CarbonArc PRO, Gaia and CubeWerx products have been selected by multiple government customers and have been featured in many recent interoperability demonstrations.

CarbonArc PRO and Gaia were developed with CarbonTools PRO, an extension to the Microsoft .NET Framework allowing software developers to add advanced geospatial interoperability to any Microsoft Windows application.

The Carbon Project, Geosocial Networking, Secure SDI, CarbonTools, Gaia and CarbonArc are trademarks or registered trademarks of Carbon Project, Inc or CubeWerx Inc. OGC is a registered trademark of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their owners.

- Jeff

Testing a cool WFS in Toulouse, France

YouTube channel features OGC SDI for ArcGIS

The Carbon Project has launched a branded channel on YouTube featuring videos on Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) usability for ESRI ArcGIS desktop users. OGC SDI is a suite of standards used by government agencies around the world to promote digital geospatial data sharing and exploitation.

The Carbon Project channel is online at http://www.youtube.com/thecarbonproject

OGC SDI will be the common language of GIS users now and into the foreseeable future – and CarbonArc PRO 1.6 makes advanced OGC SDI as easy to use as the spreadsheet on your desktop.

The Carbon Project’s YouTube channel is a free resource of helpful hints and instructions on how to easily tackle the most frustrating OGC SDI issues in ArcGIS. Visit now to see how easy it is to put CarbonArc PRO to work for your framework data, geoscience, climate change, cross-border, critical infrastructure and regulatory SDI.

ArcGIS users that want to be on the vanguard of this movement can get a free download or SDI User license for just $295 at http://www.thecarbonproject.com/carbonarc.php.

Videos on The Carbon Project channel this month feature OGC Web Feature Services (WFS) from CubeWerx Inc., a world leader in OGC SDI.


- Jeff