Hello and welcome to this demonstration about the GIS capabilities in ScienceBase.
I will focus on the capabilities of uploading shapefile and raster formats and also the
consumption of the open source GIS formats that are created as a result of that.
I will begin by going into a sample item into ScienceBase and add an item.
I will begin by adding a shapefile and I will navigate to my local drive to an area where
I know I have a shapefile saved.
This is a point shapefile with all the major cities in the United States, click, after
it's done uploading, I'll click "Done Uploading" and ScienceBase will try to scrape some of
the metadata values out of the FGDC-compliant XML file, that was associated with this shapefile.
So I will allow it to do that.
I will change the title of my item to "sample_shapefile", and then I will click "Save".
So, ScienceBase will then save this item on a local file system to ScienceBase, and also
it will automatically generate a map of that shapefile, and it will give it a default symbology
of this blue color that you see here.
Along with that, it creates this area called "Resources", underneath the map, where you
can go in and other people can go in and download this shapefile by clicking on the individual
files that make the shapefile or clicking on this overall file which will give you all
the files included in the shapefile.
So, along with this static map of all the points in the shapefile, I can also click
on the interactive mapper link, and this will open up a basic mapper which lets you interact
with your data by zooming in and out of the data, so you can get a closer look at what
you've uploaded, and so other people can see what you've uploaded to see if that's exactly
what they want to download.
So, along with those basic functionalities, you can also click on this Advanced Services
link, and this brings up two of the services that ScienceBase automatically generates for
every shapefile that is uploaded, the first one is a WMS, which stands for a Web Mapping
Service, and this service is an open source GIS format that serves pictures of the data
that can be consumed in any kind of outside application, it can be consumed in ArcGIS
Desktop, or in any kind of online mapping software that can read these open source formats.
The second type of service that it generates is a WFS, which stands for Web Feature Service,
which actually serves the data behind the scenes, it serves all the coordinates of all
these points, and then it is rendered by whatever client is reading that service, instead of
having the GIS service render that data.
So I will demonstrate how you can consume this WMS service.
I will open instance of ArcCatalog Desktop, I will go into the "GIS Servers" area, and
click "Add a WMS Server".
I will paste in that URL that I copied from ScienceBase, and as you can see, it finds
the different layers that were associated with that shapefile that I uploaded.
Click ok.
And then you have now made the connection, and you can preview that data in your ArcGIS
client software.
And you can also consume this in any other kind of online software.
So back into ScienceBase, if you want to consume the actual WFS that's the Web Feature Service,
you can also copy that link and now we'll go back into ArcCatalog, and go into the "Interoperability
Connections" area, say I want to add a connection, I will change it to WFS, I will paste in my
URL, and I will pick which layers I am interested in adding.
And it comes up with the two layers, I will pick the cities layer, I'll click ok, and
then ok, and then after I've made my connection, I can drill down and actually view the data.
So right now you can see that ArcGIS client is actually downloading all that data and
it renders it on the client here, instead of just getting a picture of the data, I can
also load that directly into, (if I minimize my screen here), I can actually drag that
directly into ArcMAP, and consume the data there too.
And then you can actually kind of treat this like a local file.
You can change a symbology on this data, and you can also read this data directly into
any kind of geoprocessing function that you want to use, and this is all possible without
actually downloading any of the data you are dynamically reading this data from the WFS
service that was created by ScienceBase.
So back into ScienceBase, that is most of the things, most of the capabilities for uploading
shapefiles, so I will go back and show you how you can upload a raster.
So currently, ScienceBase supports the reading of GeoTIFF raster formats.
Any other raster format may be uploaded to ScienceBase, but only the GeoTIFF format will
be actually displayed on a map, and that's the only format that GIS services will be
created for.
So I'll pick a sample raster, here on my local file system.
ScienceBase is uploading the raster, and after it is done uploading, I'll click on the "Done
Uploading" button, and I will leave the title as the default here, it takes the file name
as the title as the default so, that is good enough.
I'll click "Save" and ScienceBase saves this to its local file system and then it will
generate a map of that raster.
It also generates kind of this default blue symbology; it's actually a blue color ramp
that it automatically generates for this raster.
And I should also note that it is possible to change this symbology.
You have to create a custom, what's called a .sld file, and that's kind of an open source
symbology or style format that an open GIS server can read.
But then as you can see, you can use the interactive mapper with this data just as you would with
a shapefile, you can also use the Advanced Services link to see those same services as
you saw for a shapefile, you can consume this raster in the same ways that I showed you
can consume a shapefile.
That concludes the demonstration of how to upload shapefiles and rasters and how to consume
the open source GIS services that are created as a result of that.