EPA's meta(data)-morphosis

GEOSPATIAL INFORMATION, with itsintimate marriage of geographic imageryand data, has become more than a mainstayof environmentalists, educators and landuseplanners. It is a homeland securitymust-have, the interactive map that directsfirst responders to where flooding is worst orhelps terrorism analysts determine whichdams and power plants are most vulnerable.To be useful, geospatial information mustbe accessible to a wide range of users. To accomplishthat, you need metadata, files thatdescribe the contents of other files. The governmentaffirmed the need with a 1995 executiveorder and again in 2002 with an Officeof Management and Budget circularthat created the Federal Geospatial DataCommittee (FGDC), charging it with implementingnational metadata standards.But by 2005, even the Environment ProtectionAgency, perhaps the premier datagenerator and user, didn't have its act together.'There was not a single access pointfor EPA's geospatial resources, which meantthat agency staff members could not obtaina comprehensive view of EPA's geospatial assets,'said Molly O'Neill, chief informationofficer and assistant administrator of the Officeof Environmental Information (OEI).EPA lacked the documentation andpolicies needed to meet its own ' letalone FGDC's ' metadata standards.OEI set out to build a comprehensivemetadata sharing and management frameworkthat would be equal parts policies andprocedures, user outreach, and technology.The latter serves to enforce and support theformer, and it centers on a GeoData Gateway(GDG) and EPA Metadata Editor(EME). Because ESRI's ArcGIS platform iswidely deployed in EPA, its product line wasthe obvious choice for the new applications.With the new architecture, workers caneasily publish their data to the centralcatalog or have it automatically exchangedand synchronized across repositories, which are complete collections thathave already met EPA requirements.A favorite tool is the Data Delivery Extension,a feature of GIS Portal Toolkit that theteam customized to simplify access to externaldata sources. Its ability to extract a subset ofthe national database in a fraction of the previoustime proved critical to EPA's Chicago officeduring the deadly Midwest floods lastspring, said Matthew Leopard, chief of OEI'sinformation services and support branch.'When you're dealing with an emergency,you're going to only want that area,' Leopardsaid. 'It reuses our data in a way that's neverbeen done before. The implications are huge.'One of the best things we've done recently istie into external Web services,' Leopard added,citing Microsoft Virtual Earth as an example.'It's very fast, very robust and really presents anice interface.'O'Neill said GDG and EME have become recognizedas models for comprehensive metadatamanagement. 'The EME has been downloadedby over 1,400 users and deployed bystates and other public communities,' shesaid.Foreign countries have sought EPA's metadataexpertise, Leopard said. Internally,geospatial analysts no longer work with incompatibledata, and they retain control overassets in the repository.'The overall reports have been just glowinglypositive,' said Jerry Johnston,EPA's geospatial information officer andthe user community's representative onthe project as chairman of its GIS WorkingGroup.'It takes away the mystery of what you'resupposed to do, not only to meet the federalrequirements but also making data availableto your colleagues.'Usability and searchability are vastly improved.'Before, we had static Web pagesfilled with links to documents,' Johnston said.'Now we have a more modern, database-drivensystem that's searchable.'XXXSPLITXXX-Although the Environmental ProtectionAgency already used ESRI's ArcGIS,the agency's metadata project teamfaced hurdles in a geospatial project,especially in customizing software tomeet EPA requirements.An early adopter of ESRI's GIS PortalToolkit, EPA was among the first agenciesto discover some of its shortcomings,including its metadata editor's noncompliancewith the Federal GeospatialData Committee's requirements.The team's solution was to adapt athree-tab desktop extension toArcCatalog that Idaho's Coeur D'Alenetribe had developed. A second, completelyrewritten version of the resultingapplication, the EPA MetadataEditor (EME), added a MicrosoftAccess database to populate fields inthe user interface, making the databasemore easily customized while providingmore instructions about metadata procedures.It also has a spell-checker andEPA validation service and was writtenon Microsoft's VB.Net developmentplatform to accommodate a Web-baseduser interface.In addition, the toolkit's map viewerdidn't recognize some services andsometimes choked on large datasets,said Michelle Torreano, project managerat EPA's Office of EnvironmentalInformation. 'We're still trying to worksome of that out,' Torreano said.The team expressed pride in successfullytying the GeoData Gateway intothe agency's existing single sign-onsecurity infrastructure. The capabilityis important in managing assets bysecurely dividing internal private data' some of which has national securityimplications ' and public data.To get the geospatial system working,EPA deactivated the feature in GISPortal Toolkit and used Oracle'sCOREid federated identity-provisioningsoftware to establish group policies,said Jessica Zichichi, vice president ofgeospatial sales at Innovate, the companythat consulted on outreach, trainingand procedures development. 'Theymodified the database to be able tohave an extra flag on records that saidthey could be either internal, or internaland external,' Zichichi said.