Sharing Forestry Data: The Canadian Forest Service

Canada is big, with millions of acres of forested land. What if you were in charge of making sure your organization could access and report on information from all country organizations that deal with forests and forestry? Information about the sustainable management of the forests, trees available as timber, those that are protected, those that are not healthy… That's not a theoretical task; it's the job of the federal Department of Natural Resources Canada - Canadian Forest Service (CFS).

The Challenge

The good news for CFS is that Canadian provinces and territories, the organizations required to report on the state of the country's forests, had information systems in place in 1998. However, each organization had implemented their own business process and technology solutions to maintain their jurisdictional spatial and thematic data holdings. The challenge therefore is how to effectively share that data.

The process for creating the required reports sometimes meant running numbers at one organization in a spreadsheet application, requesting data from other government organizations and waiting for floppy disks in the mail. There was the additional issue of using the data from the other government organization once it arrived. The various independent government organizations use a rainbow of data formats (DGN files, shape files, coverages, MIF/MID) and a wide range of database schemas.

 
Defining Principles

As Dr. Robin Quenet, Project Manager, National Forest Information System (NFIS) put it, "we needed to rationally address data sharing." As the CFS team explored how to provide access to information across the different players, it developed four key business principles:

1. The solution had to be vendor neutral ("we didn't want to buy into a single system")
2. The solution had to have a low cost of entry (funding for the different partners varied widely)
3. The solution had to ensure that intellectual property rights stayed with the agency/government that created the data
4. The solution, to address low cost of entry, should have an open source option

Considering these requirements led the team to explore the use of standards. During 1998 and 1999, GeoConnections Canada, as part of the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) program, was exploring the use of standards and ideas coming from the then four-year-old Open GIS Consortium (OGC). Says Evelynne Wrangler, Director of Forest Information for the Forest Service, "this story is all about timing."

After examining OGC plans for the OpenGIS Web Map Service Specification (WMS) as well as the overall OGC vision, the CFS team, like GeoConnections, felt that OpenGIS Specifications held the key to solve the spatial data-sharing problem. While CFS was sold on using the specifications early on, its fourteen partner organizations wanted to better understand the business case to properly evaluate the concept. Part of the compelling argument for use of OpenGIS Specifications came from the requirements for these organizations to provide a variety of different reports on the state of their forest holdings. Another part of the argument highlighted how adherence to OGC standards would allow the partners to make effective and efficient use of their legacy and ongoing investment in IT and data resources, both for themselves and related organizations. Perhaps the most fundamental argument was that this vision enabled each organization to maintain responsibility for its own data, and at the same time, make it available for broader use by others.

Because the CFS partners are geographically distributed all over the Canada, and the data would stay at all of those locations, the CFS dubbed the vision "distributed interoperability." With the initial success, another key group came on board, the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers (CCFM), the federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for forests. Their support, together with that of GeoConnections and CFS, resulted in the National Forest Information System, an initiative to implement the necessary information technology framework to demonstrate sustainable forest management practices in Canada. Wrangler reports "The CCFM support underlined that they were serious about demonstrated leadership in technology as well as sustainable forest management"

Making it Happen

Rick Morrison, former NFIS Technical Lead, selected CubeWerx's OpenGIS Web Map Service implementation for use at CFS. CFS was one of the earliest implementers of OGC Web Services. CFS actually began using the CubeWerx products even before the Web Map Service specification was fully implemented in CubeServ, the server-side product. The early adoption meant that CFS could share its requirements, test out new versions, and actively participate with the CubeWerx development team.

At the same time Brian Low, Geospatial Scientist and NFIS Technical Lead, was exploring the open source requirement. He learned of the University of Minnesota's open source MapServer Web mapping solution and began speaking to Steve Lime from Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, one of its key developers. Lime pointed him to a Canadian company, DM Solutions, a group just beginning its work with MapServer. Low explained to DM Solutions that for the CFS vision to work, MapServer would need to support WMS. Not long afterward DM Solutions, with funding from CFS and GeoConnections Access, began work. Funding from CCFM and GeoConnection GeoInnovations fueled further NFIS-required enhancements.

Several of the CFS partners already had Web mapping solutions, including ESRI's ArcIMS, and crafted their own solutions to make them compatible while vendor offerings were in development. One CARIS user went directly to the vendor to explain the necessity of the addition, which appeared in the software not long afterward. CFS was pleased with the fast turnaround of several small Canadian firms in meeting its partners' needs.

Today, some 2/3 of the CFS partners are running MapServer, with implementations of ESRI's ArcIMS, CubeWerx' CubeServ, CARIS Spatial Fusion and other products filling out the roster. Partners are sharing data in ways not dreamed possible only a few years ago.

Security Side

With data sharing comes data security concerns. Some of the data involved in the required reports is quite sensitive. Some is tied to cost recovery and requires a "payment for use." Some provinces feel strongly about controlling what data is released to the federal government.

Those issues meant that just linking up a series of WMS servers would not solve all of CFS' needs. "Security is paramount," says Low.

What CFS needed wasn't a simple security solution with a password, but one that went deeper. The security solution would need to set security by coverage (layer) of spatial data. After contracting with another small Canadian firm, Distributed Systems Software, Inc. of Richmond, BC, CFS had what it needed. But the story on security doesn't end there.

In 2002 the resulting security architecture was incorporated into an OGC interoperability report as part of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Initiative work on a security standard. Interoperability reports are documents describing results of interoperability initiatives that may in time become approved specifications.

Beyond OpenGIS Specifications

While OpenGIS specifications are at the heart of the CFS solution, the generally broad stroke specifications don't provide details for what Quenet calls "mid-tier services." These are services that deal with lower level needs, but that depend on the high level specs to make them workable across all the vendor solutions involved.

CFS has developed quite a number of "mid tier-services" that are essentially little, focused specifications. Quenet's favorite is a service that allows for WMS servers to contribute layers that are then merged to form a new map. What type of geoprocessing? Intersect, buffer, "corridor" and more. Quenet, clearly proud of the specifications, notes the geoprocessing "happens so fast it'll make your head spin." He also pointed out that this is "quick and dirty" geoprocessing, since all that's returned is a raster picture of the results. But, he notes, "It's perfect to find out if an area is worth exploring further with detailed data and robust desktop analysis software."

A few other "mid-tier services" include:

(1) Thematic portal templates for MapServer - these allow casual users to easily publish specific layers and capabilities with a just a few steps
(2) Web Reports for Feature Sets - tools to run simple statistics on attribute data, then run more detailed reports on attributes of interest
(3) Oracle Data Store - a process to take spatially defined samples of large data sets, store them in Oracle, and use them for quick spatial processing
(4) User Defined Area of Interest - a tool to bound an area of interest and run statistic on that area alone
(5) GeoBoard - a tool to post "sticky" notes to other servers

What's the future of these "mid tier services"? The CFS team hopes one day they will filter back to OGC for inclusion in its set of specifications.

Lessons Learned and What's Ahead

The CFS team is quick to point out one overarching challenge during the development of "distributed interoperability": communications. As Quenet put it, "we were very good about posting information about what we'd already done on our website. What we later learned is that we need to post what we plan to do, what we are doing along with what we've already done." That, Wrangler hopes will prevent other "sister agencies from reinventing the wheel." And, to that end, the team is meeting regularly with other departments and seeing "glimmers of interest."

The project was successful, the team feels, not because it had large amounts of money behind it, but because "this was something we had to do. It was not an adventure, but a necessity." The team also points to two key groups that pushed the project forward. A strong federal/provincial/territorial Strategic Working Group put the plans together and made them happen. A Steering Committee made up of assistant deputy ministers from all provincial and territorial forestry departments and CFS gives the project high profile support.

The CFS team is not resting. It's pushing forward. The team's been active in working with DM Solutions on its Chameleon platform (a simple customization interface for MapServer) and is working hard to find a solution to its needs related to OGC's in-work Service Registry specification, again in partnership with GeoConnections.

About the Author Adena Schutzberg owns ABS Consulting Group, Inc. She writes about geospatial topics on behalf of the Open GIS Consortium and other clients.