Dashboard Brings Transparency, Syndication to NSDI Services

This week The Carbon Project announced the availability of an open source dashboard for Geodata.gov, the federal government’s information service for maps and data. The free application enables “at-a-glance” visualization of geospatial assets and monitoring of Geospatial One-Stop (GOS) search from desktop PCs.

The GOS Dashboard is available as a free download - and a video preview is available at our website and YouTube.

“The GOS Dashboard is designed to integrate Geodata.gov search and access functions into enterprise users desktops, and make geospatial data and services more open and transparent,” says Doug Nebert, Senior Advisor for Geospatial Technology at the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC).

“The GOS Dashboard is powered by GeoRSS and builds on our experience developing applications for SDI,” said Nuke Goldstein, The Carbon Project's CTO. “It's based on Microsoft Gadgets and enhances common RSS functions with the ability to configure searches, view geodata footprints on mini-maps, and access desktop GIS applications from ESRI and other vendors directly with the data people find.”

But Nuke's last comment above really doesn't do justice to the power of Service-Feed-App syndication. By that I mean the GOS Dashboard is not just reading feeds with 'dead' data - it's reading feeds with 'live' services so WMS/WFS become new dynamic connections permanently maintained in apps like Gaia (you may never want to go back to boring KML, CSV, and Shapefiles data downloads). An example of this kind of syndication is shown above with MassGIS WFS-Geodata.gov-Gaia.

The GOS Dashboard is part of the 2009 National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) Cooperative Agreement Program (CAP) - and we'll be hosting an initial online workshop on August 31, 2009 to promote community dialog on the functions with NSDI users and developers. If you want to participate please contact info@thecarbonproject.com.