Geospatial One-Stop - Transportation Pilot

In this pilot project, OGC partnered with the US Department of Transportation (Bureau of Transportation Statistics) and FGDC to test the use of data content models for practical application by cooperating communities, specifically focusing on Road Transportation data. OGC tested and demonstrated the use of FGDC's Road Transportation Data Content Standard with software products that employ OpenGIS® Specifications such as Web Feature Service (WFS) and Geography Markup Language (GML). OGC also developed a mechanism to generate GML Application Schemas from the logical models and implemented prototypical translating Web Feature Servers hosting transportation data from the State of California, the State of Oregon, Jackson County Oregon, and Siskiyou County California. GOS-TP succeeded in enabling users to view data and maps available from these nodes via a prototype Portal Gateway built for FGDC.

The WFS-implementing servers prototyped in OGC's GOS-TP and CIPI-2 pilot projects translate queries and the resultant response – GML-encoded data – from a national model to the local model and vice versa. The data thus becomes “as useful as possible” to the data sharing partner who uses a different model. Certain elements of the local model may not map to the national model, but the development of the translating "script" make these inconsistencies plain in all their details, so that it is easy for data managers to account for the critical schema elements that don’t translate. This makes both data sharing and data coordination much easier. It makes it easier for people at the local level to accommodate national standards in an affordable and practical way, and it makes it easier for people at the national level to work with local data that hasn’t been converted in all its details to the national standard.

The project developed a pilot architecture and two Interoperability Project Reports concerning the use of eXtensible Stylesheet Language: Transformations (XSLT, a W3C recommendation) and XML Query (XQuery, a W3C working draft) in the context of a translating Web Feature Service. These are currently available to OGC members and may be made public at some point in the near future.