The South African Earth Observation Network (SAEON) and the Council for Industrial and Scientific Research (CSIR) recently held an in-house launch and demonstration of CoGIS (Collaborative Geographical Information Service). CoGIS is a locally developed environmental geoportal, which will enable SAEON and its network of partners to share and integrate spatial information sourced from a variety of providers connected via a web-based network. It is a collaborative platform for the sharing of spatial data and its metadata. It is also capable of handling non-spatial data and document content, and provides support for additional domain-specific metadata standards. It provides extensive search capabilities that can be tailored to serve specific user communities.
SAEON, a major user of the CoGIS portal, consists of a number of biome-specific nodes, located throughout South Africa and its mandate includes long-term earth and environmental observation, education, and information management in support of these tasks. Researchers at SAEON’s various nodes across the country will be able to input new data, access and integrate existing data, analyse and add value to the data, and share knowledge. This knowledge will enable national and international policy makers to develop policies and strategies to implement in response to global change.
In addition to SAEON the CSIR is a major contributor to the development, maintenance and extension of the CoGIS platform. Past contributors include the Department of Mineral and Energy Affairs and the National Research Foundation.
Speaking at the event Johan Pauw, managing director of SAEON, said this celebrating and showcasing of CoGIS was only part of a much larger and ongoing process. He added that he expected a slow start to the CoGIS system but thereafter he expected it to accelerate global change research. Pauw also said that global change research would be severely limited if researchers did not have access to accurately managed data.
Dr. Pat Manders (CSIR) thanked the Department of Science and Technology for their support of the CoGIS project, and emphasised that CoGIS was a product of collaboration. He also thanked Wim Hugo for his assistance in getting CoGIS to its present level of functionality.
Wim Hugo in his presentation of CoGIS pointed out that the portal consists of a multi-standard metadata aggregator that supports all supported metadata standards i.e. ISO 19115, ISO 109139, SANS 1878, FGDC (Federal Geographic Data Committee), EML (Ecological Markup Language), and Dublin Core. He added that crosswalls have been built into the CoGIS system to handle the overlap/divergence of various metadata standards.
CoGIS will be launched by the time this article appears and the next challenge is to develop an active user community.
Contact Wim Hugo, MBV Equsys, Tel 021 880-0885, whugo@mbv.co.za or Avinash Chuntharpursat, SAEON, Tel 012 349-5133, avinash@saeon.ac.za