| Patrick Florance Manager Geospatial Technology Services Tufts University |
David Siegel Geospatial Data and Information Software Engineer Harvard University |
| Tom Cramer Chief Technology Strategist and Associate Director Stanford University |
Chris Barnett Developer Tufts University |
Many organizations and institutions are developing large spatial data repositories. Discovering and accessing these data sets pose many challenges. As a result, Tufts University and Harvard University are collaboratively developing an open source, federated Web application to discover, preview, and retrieve geospatial data. The Open Geoportal combines an intuitive, map-based search interface along with traditional text-based metadata search tools for rapid data discovery and for use in teaching, learning, and research. It is comprised of several universities and organizations and makes thousands of geospatial data layers available through a single, open source interface; partners include Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Geographic Information System, Princeton University, Columbia University, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Los Angeles, Yale University, and the University of Connecticut.
Built on open source technology, The Open Geoportal provides organizations the opportunity to share geospatial data, maps, metadata, and development resources through a single common interface. Key open source components include Geoserver, Open Layers, Solr/Lucene, GeoWebCache, jQuery, etc. Panelists from Harvard, Tufts, and Stanford will discuss areas such as open-source application development, spatial data infrastructure, Web-based open source geospatial tools, open data, federated metadata harvesting, Web services, governance models, partnerships, etc.