Offering a Complete Solution for SDI Portal Implementation

ESRI's GIS Portal Toolkit is a technology and services solution for implementing local, regional, national, and global spatial data infrastructure (SDI) portals. GIS portals organize content and services such as directories, search tools, community information, support resources, data, and applications. They provide capabilities to query metadata records for relevant data and services and then link directly to the online sites that host content services. The content can be visualized as maps and used in geographic queries and analyses.

ESRI's GIS Portal Toolkit provides all the tools and templates to create a GIS portal. Based on ESRI's ArcIMS and ArcSDE server technology, this standards-based product is a cost-effective way to build a functional site quickly.

The key elements of the GIS Portal Toolkit are

• Portal Web Site Template-A collection of template Web pages, scripts, and content that constitute a functional draft of a GIS portal Web site. The template provides tools to carry out a number of tasks such as building a user interface to the site, hosting user-supplied content in the form of Web pages, querying content, and much more.
• Map Viewer-A browser-based map data viewer that can combine data services from one or more portals. The Map Viewer has extensive functionality for map navigation, printing, selection queries, data exploration, direct use of online Web services, and fusing multiple services into a single map.
• Metadata Catalog-A searchable repository that can store, update, and retrieve metadata documents.

The GIS Portal Toolkit database is populated with documents that describe GIS services (geoservices) published by a GIS service provider. Users can issue queries that search the database either from a lightweight Web client or a heavier weight desktop GIS client, provided that they have an Internet connection. This allows users to discover what services are available on a particular topic for a particular geographic area. The services can then be directly used in client applications.

The GIS Portal Toolkit is built using industry standards including TCP/IP and HTTP for accessing services and ISO 19115 for storing metadata. Data is stored in industry-standard database management systems and can be requested and served in all widely used GIS standards such as Z39.50, Geography Markup Language (GML), Web Map Service (WMS), and Web Feature Service (WFS).

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