Virtual Oregon is a new data coordination center established at Oregon
State University in order to: (1) archive environmental and other
place-based data on Oregon and associated areas; (2) make those data
accessible to a broad spectrum of agencies and individuals via innovative
web interfaces; (3) identify key data sets that are not yet available
and encourage their collection and dissemination; and (4) facilitate
development of statewide standards for archiving, documenting, and
disseminating data. Rather than co-locating researchers and data in a
physical center, Virtual Oregon employs a distributed architecture that
occupies multiple locations while users are presented with the illusion
of a single, centralized facility. This approach was selected not
just to maximize the impact on campus students, faculty, and staff,
but also to service broader interactions with extension agents and
other members of Oregon State's statewide community. Virtual Oregon builds
on regional GIS centers and databanks in a wide range of disciplines,
providing decades of research data on topics as varied as coastal
processes, climate, biodiversity, land ownership, water quality,
wildfire, and agricultural production. There are four distributed nodes,
each serving as a center and clearinghouse for distinct types of
information and services:
- Department of Geosciences (College of Science): geospatial coverages,
digital aerial and ortho imagery and associated base data
- Forestry Sciences Laboratory (USDA Forest Service and Oregon
State's College of Forestry): ecological and resource management
databases; data analyses; data from computational simulations
- Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering
(NACSE): databases based on specimen collections, field observation,
images, or analysis of historical documents; user interface design
- Valley Library: published maps, books and archival publications,
gray literature, photographs and video
Data are harvested from a variety of individuals and research centers
and maintained in the distributed nodes using enterprise RDBMS
products (Oracle, Sybase, and Microsoft SQL Server) residing on UNIX
and Windows platforms. Query Markup Language (QML, a middleware
product developed at NACSE) supports database-to-Web interactions
by transparently performing queries across multiple RDBMSs and displaying
the results as though from a single source. Web-based mapping
interfaces (powered by ESRI's Internet Map Server and Spatial Database
Engine products) can also be used to explore data visually. In a
proof-of-concept under development, users currently have the option
of beginning with either the "thematic" or "place-based" interfaces.
Ultimately, users will be able to move freely back and forth between
the two paradigms, for example initially narrowing the scope of inquiry
based on discipline or attributes, moving to the visual interface to
refine the search based on location or some set of geospatial
characteristics, then moving back to query-based exploration to delve
to fine levels of detail. Usability engineering methodologies are
being applied so that all navigation and query mechanisms are both
maximally productive and easily learned by novices.
virtual-oregon.nacse.org
0910 Data processing
3000 Marine Geology and Geophysics
4294 Instruments and techniques
Ocean Sciences [OS]
Special Session: Data Integration, Publication, and Archival (DIPA) I