Technology

AmericaView's technology goals and objectives are broad and are supported by the Technology Committee, one of several special interest groups of the AmericaView national consortium. The Technology Committee was established to support StateView consortia members who are particularly interested in advancing the uses and applications of remotely sensed data and geospatial technology, and to organize larger projects that involve several states. The Technology Committee is led by Dr. Sam Batzli of University of Wisconsin-Madison and  PI of WisconsinView. The committee addresses a range of issues, focusing primarily on the AmericaView data archive and distribution mission.  Specifically, the Technology Committee provides a forum for:

• Scholarly exchange of insights and experiences;
• Developing and sharing of technical expertise;
• Fostering and developing collaborative data archive, data distribution, and related web services projects.

The Technology Committee maintains an active Wiki page open to all AmericaView consortia members. The Wiki provides an open forum for exchanging ideas, hosting technical documents and committee plans, and facilitates the organization of committee meetings.

Multi-State Data Delivery Project   Ten states are working on a joint project to distribute the best available high resolution imagery as a tiled web service. These tiles would be prerendered (for performance) and available in a limited number of projections, such as WGS84 (suitable for overlaying in Google Earth), spherical Mercator (suitable for overlaying on many existing tiles such as Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, etc), and a locally appropriate coordinate system (suitable for state and local governments).

The project will use hardware/software based on an existing AlaskaView system (AlaskaMapped).  The project will be expandable (by purchasing additional drives) in future years, if other StateViews would like to participate.  Contributions to the joint effort include:

• AlaskaView will deploy the initial hardware in partnership with the hosting site.
• AlaskaView will deploy the initial software stack. A small group of software-savvy AmericaView members will work with AlaskaView to learn the software and help with the ongoing maintenance.
• All StateViews contributing data that will be distributed as WMS and tile feeds will help get their submitted data into a format suitable for ingestion. This will, at the very least, require the creation of format-specific metadata files that the ingestion software requires. It may also require some image processing work such as clipping, edge matching, fixing no-data values, etc. Depending on the source data set, this process can require significant effort and participants need to be prepared to make this effort on behalf of their state.
• All participating StateViews will need to commit to a training and outreach program for the services. AlaksaView and others can provide template materials and support for webinar training, but each state needs to commit to getting the word out to their users.
• MichiganView (Tyler Erickson) will provide project coordination, data processing scripts, and Google Earth regionation.
• TexasView (PR Blackwell) will provide hosting and potential integration with REDDnet.
• North DakotaView (Brad Rundquist) will produce educational materials.
• WisconsinView (Sam Batzli) will provide mobile device integration.