Geospatial Web Portals Put GIS in Hands of the User
Geospatial Solutions features an article on GeoSpatial Web Portals - technology that integrates and presents data from paper records, geodatabases, GIS software, and nonspatial databases and applications.
The article describes how portals and portlets work; from the ROI of open APIs and modular application-building to the fundamental difference between a portal and a website.
To get firsthand experience with geospatial portals, the author visited Farallon Geographics in downtown San Francisco. Farallon’s CEO, Dennis Wuthrich, presented an assessor’s parcel portal that integrated property maps, permitting, property valuation, and land-use planning from several different departmental databases. Farallon uses software from Plumtree to build its geospatial portals.
To an executive such as Wuthrich,a portal’s greatest value is in securely unifying the content of formerly uncooperative departments with minimal changes to operations. “In the parcel portal,” he explains, “imagine that the parcel server and voting precinct server are managed by independent departments that historically have refused to share data. Now they don’t have to share, replicate, or exchange data at all, if they can agree to publish geodata through a web service. Their data and applications remain in their control but permit specific question-and-answer exchanges, such as, ‘What precinct contains this point?’”
In the framework of portal technology, Wuthrich has observed customers’ conversations shifting from “I’ll give you a little bit of my data if you give me a little bit of yours,” to “What’s the business problem we’re going to solve?” Any software that encourages such a fundamental shift in attitude is worth serious consideration.
A PDF reprint of the article that appeared in GeoSpatial Solutions Magazine is available in the presentations section.