I wanted to talk a bit about the project that led me to build Mapdex.  In Winter of 2004 my organization was awarded funding from the US Department of Energy to build a distributed atlas for carbon sequestration (www.natcarb.org).  We were tasked with creating an online atlas that integrated and displayed data from seven different partnerships.  For this project we went with a distributed approach to managing and serving this spatial data.  We built a portal that allows us to simultaneously request maps and data from remote disparate map services (ArcIMS and WMS 1.1.x).  Essentially when a client requests a map from Natcarb we simultaneously request an image from each of the integrated partners, merge the images on our server, and send the final image back to the client.  As we were building the framework to connect each of the partnerships, we realized that we could use data from ANY map service.  National datasets like...

• National Elevation Dataset from seamless.usgs.gov;
• Digital Orthophoto quarter quads from terraserver.microsoft.com;
• North America Satellite Imagery from the geographynetwork.com;
• National Map Infrastructure maps from seamless.usgs.gov;

are at our fingertips.

This infrastructure allows us to serve approximately 150 geographic layers from over 15 different organizations in one portal.

I see targeted portals as an exciting/useful development opportunity.  What do I mean by targeted portals?  Something like (but not exclusive) the natcarb project.  In that project we are building a website that makes use of distributed map services, but in a targeted way (we have picked the distributed layers that we want the public to see). 

Some group might want an interactive map site that has NED and Landcover from the Eros data center, and population from the census bureau, & parks & rec data from Kansas.  This distributed mapping approach pulls the data from the various sources, but integrates it within a website.  The user doesn't have to know where to get the data or how to ingest it.  It is a database driven application that allows the site manager to add specific layers (& columns for that matter) from distributed map services.  The ease of management of the site is the key.

Cyberinfrastructure doesn't have to be that complicated.  The technology is there, and it works.

For more info see the following powerpoints:
http://hercules.kgs.ku.edu/kgs/oilgas/powerpoints/UC2004_BARTLEY_NATCARB.ppt
http://hercules.kgs.ku.edu/kgs/oilgas/powerpoints/natcarb_regcarbSEQ_2005.ppt

Questions/Comments?

Jeremy