Confronted with a major crisis in the form of the destructive Canterbury earthquakes of 2010/11, various information communities in Christchurch, New Zealand were suddenly compelled to re-engineer business-as-usual information sharing practices. The former ways of doing things would not scale to meet the new demands for timely and up-to-date information.
They addressed the challenge by adopting standards-based interoperable services to share geospatial information. These achieved efficiencies critical to the disaster response and are on-going for the recovery processes.
Sharing information is one step; Christchurch Earthquake recovery partners defined a further ambition to transact updates between one another, on their different platforms.
To accelerate cross-platform interoperability, the recovery partners, with support from LINZ, hosted a so-called ‘Plugfest’ in May 2012. Within three days a working solution between four vendor platforms was implemented and demonstrated, based on OGC compliant, transactional web-services.
This presentation outlines what was achieved and how. It also invites the audience to consider whether other communities could do likewise i.e. leverage similar benefits, without a catastrophe as catalyst? Establishing geospatial web services as the new ‘business as usual’.
5. Post Feb 2011 – Recovery Period
Council Systems Intact!
Data Sharing
Council
EM Agencies
Civil Defence
Utilities
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
Environment Canterbury (ECAN)
Etc…
Initially: Sneakernet…
10. WFS for Data Supply Works
Kyle Dow, Senior Data Analyst, Corporate Data Team, CCC
11. Next step: Receiving Data?
?
? ?
?
Kyle Dow, Senior Data Analyst, Corporate Data Team, CCC
12. Same Issues, but…
Christchurch City holds
Authoritative Data, e.g…
WasteWater
Building Status
Construction partners manually
submit data in variety of formats
Time & Money wasted on data
loading & management
WFS has no capability to receive
updates through interoperable web
services
13. Transactional Web Service: WFS-T
WFS: Geometry & Attributes - “Read Only”
WFS-T: As WFS + “Create, Update, Delete”
CCC + Partners struggled to successfully
enable WFS-T
OGC compliance of their Software?
Schema harmonisation?
“Too hard” basket?
Image: http://villagescribe.com.au
14. What they needed:
Transactional Interoperability between
recovery partners:
CERA, CCC, SCIRT
ESRI, Integraph
OGC Standards (NZGO SDI Cookbook)
Practical, short-term solution (can‟t wait)
Focus on issues with existing (OGC)
standards interfaces, notably WFS-T
Immediate results that will accelerate
recovery & reconstruction efforts
15. Solution: WFS-T Plugfest
Short Duration
Collaborative
Hands-on
Independent Facilitation & WFS-T Architect
“Just Make it Work”
Image: http://www.ispcs.org
16. Two Use-Case
scenarios
Set-up Data and
Services
Implement end-to-
end Interoperability
Photo: Maurits van der Vlugt
Live Demo
All in 3 days!
17. Technology Agnostic
Organisation Technologies
CCC Intergraph GeoMedia Pro
Intergraph GeoMedia WebMap
SCIRT ESRI ArcGIS Server
ESRI ArcGIS Desktop
Safe Software – FME
WFS „Pump script‟
CERA Benoli Silverfish
ESRI GeoDatabase
WFS „Pump script‟
InsureCorp* Pitney Bowes Software MapInfo
Professional
* fictitious name to protect any commercial interests
20. Lessons Learned
Interoperability works!
WFS: Mature
COTS WFS-T Servers: Mature
COTS WFS-T Clients: Maturing
WFS/WFS-T Schema Sensitive
Good Community Schema is important
Submitting to WFS-T requires scripting
or Client plug-ins
21. Conclusions
Plugfest model is highly
effective to achieve hands-on
practical interoperability
Demonstrated viable solution
architecture with immediate
business benefits
Achieved in 3-day Plugfest,
what would have taken weeks
(effort) or months (elapsed) Photo: Andy Coote
otherwise