Success at GOS Dashboard Workshop

GOS Dashboard - Enterprise GIS Dashboard for Geodata.gov

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This week we conducted our first online workshop for the open-source GOS Dashboard - the beginning a community dialog on the functions of the dashboard with NSDI users and developers.

As we've discussed, the purpose of this 2009 NSDI CAP project is to develop an open source dashboard for Geodata.gov, the federal government's information service for maps and data. The GOS Dashboard is designed to help integrate Geodata.gov search functions into GIS desktops and make NSDI data and services more open and transparent.

The agenda covered an overview of the GOS Dashboard (see above), demos (thanks to MassGIS for awesome WMS and WFS) and group discussion. We had folks from a variety of federal, state, local and private sector organizations online and the breadth of experience was evident. We showed how the GOS Dashboard can quickly find data and services from Geodata.gov, integrate with the NSDI Status Checker and link to desktop GIS applications. The response from the group was the GOS Dashboard is useful and folks seemed to like the design. Comments ranged from suggestions on UI adjustments to thoughts on "widgetizing" it for web pages so the functions are usable by folks not running Windows Vista/7. Thanks to all for taking the time to contribute!

The GOS Dashboard is now available as a free download and please feel free to share your comments online at the GOS Dashboard Forum.

- Jeff