EDINA and Snowflake Software announce the launch of innovative, new MasterMap on-line delivery service for UK academia
Edinburgh
/ Southampton: EDINA and Snowflake Software are proud to announce that
32,000 academic users in over 148 higher and further education
institutions now have access to Ordnance Survey MasterMap through the
EDINA Digimap service.
The Digimap service is a flag ship
service of the UK Joint Information Service Committee, and has been
designed, built and operated by the EDINA National Data Centre at the
University of Edinburgh.
Since 2000 it has provided some
148 subscribing academic institutions and over 50,000 users with access
to a wide range of Ordnance Survey products and has become an essential
resource for research and teaching in UK higher and further education.
With
the imminent withdrawal of Ordnance Survey Land-Line and its
replacement by OS MasterMap, EDINA had to work to build an alternative
delivery to replace the rather simple mechanism currently used by users
who download Land-line data.
This new facility went live
last Tuesday and is now serving the OS MasterMap Topographic and
Integrated Transport Network (ITN) layers to the UK's academic
community. Bearing in mind that the Topography Layer alone is a
seamless database of over 400 million objects (where each object also
has a rich set of attributes associated with it) this project was no
mean feat – especially in view of the fact that each user has a
different demand for data provision.
There were several requirements which make the facility unique:
- All data delivery had to be on line, even for large quantities of data
- The facility had to be simple to use given that the data will be downloaded by non-experts as well as expert users
- Users needed to have the option to take just “since then” Change-Only-Update data or total re-supply
- Users wanted access to historic MasterMap data as well as current data
- The system needed to be robust and scalable – anticipating additional user growth and the inclusion of other GML datasets.
EDINA
and Snowflake Software collaborated closely on the project to deliver a
robust, fault tolerant data supply facility to the community. This
system is scalable enough to comfortably handle peak loads as well as
occasional requests that fall outside normal parameters.
Software Components and Data Flow Diagram
EDINA
opted for a “Service Oriented Architecture” approach based on Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards and best practices. The selection
of specific ‘best of breed' tools for the various components was,
therefore, an important part of the process.
Oracle’s10g
Spatial Database was selected as the database management solution to
store the OS MasterMap data. Following functional and performance
benchmarking, EDINA also selected Snowflake Software’s GO Publisher and
GO Loader as the other main third party commercial tool to be
implemented.
“GO Publisher was selected primarily due to
its ability to scale both in terms of memory and CPU usage and also its
ability to stream back gigabytes of GML with little impact on the
system,” explained Dr. David Medyckyj-Scott of EDINA. “Another
important consideration was that GO Publisher is a translational Web
Feature Server (WFS) and the GML that it produces validates exactly
against the original Ordnance Survey definition files. Furthermore, the
graphical user interface is very good at quickly creating new mappings
so it is very easy to add or alter elements which will bring us
benefits when we move to make other national data sets available.”
Utilizing
standards based 3rd party tools for the storage and GML interfacing
meant EDINA could concentrate on developing the middleware layers and
the customer interface.
The data delivery facility is
simply, but efficiently, addressed. The End User places an order which
is evaluated, prioritized, and processed within the system. The user
receives an email when the order is has been processed and returns to
the facility to download the MasterMap data. Getting copies of historic
MasterMap will just be a case of setting the date of interest as well
as the area. For the first time researchers will have access to large
scale historic dataset which will add a new dimension to the research
that is possible.
The opening screen of the MasterMap data facility
It is the ability to dynamically and pro-actively manage different levels of demand that is the key to the success of Digimap.
This is achieved by:
- Queue prioritisation
- Re-scheduling for off-peak large data delivery
- Automated load balancing
- Scalability through dynamic hardware upgrade during run time
“Digimap
has been in beta testing for 6 months with 6 universities,” continued
Dr Medyckyj-Scott. “Now we have gone live and already we are seeing
high levels of use. We are truly convinced we have fully addressed the
real requirements of an on-line web-based GML delivery service.”
EDINA
will be presenting the capabilities of the Digimap MasterMap data
supply facility at AGI 2007, in Stratford-on-Avon later this month. A
post-conference White Paper on “A Web Application Deployment Model for
OS MasterMap®” will be made available.
