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Using The National Map (TNM) services to enable your web and mobile mapping efforts

Please stand by. Please stand by.

>> good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining. We will get going in a few moments. Thank you for your patience.

>> thank you for joining the webinar this morning. We will get started in a few moments. Thank you. We will do a communications check. Rick Brown, are you on?

>> yes.

>> Adam?

>> yes.

>> thank you all for joining. Good morning. Thank you for joining the National Map webinar. We will get started in a couple of minutes. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for joining the National Map webinar this morning. I appreciate your patience. We will get started in another minute. Thank you. Good morning. It is 9:00 a.m. Mountain Time. We will get started now. Thank you for joining. We appreciate your attendance to this webinar. My name is Brian Fox. I am with the national geospatial technical area. We are going to talk about how the national mapping services enable your web and mobile mapping efforts. The objective is to expose to developers, user communities and anyone else on the phone how our data and services and products available at USGS can help you. Our agenda, I will provide a quick introduction and pass the ball to Rick Brown. He is our technical lead. He will run through how the USGS geospatial services can help you. Following Rick Brown, Camille Ambrosi. He will show how USGS services are enabling his mobile app. Following Camille, a question and answer session. After that, we will finish up and there is additional information you can look forward to online. Last year, we posted a number of information afterward. Rick's slides will be posted, as well as a transcript of the webinar. We will post the FAQ's and that will be shared online. Without further a ideu I will pass the ball to Rick Brown.

Rick: Thank you. Can you hear me all right?

Brian: Sure can. We are waiting on WebEx. Thank you for your patience.

Rick: we will be doing a question and answer at the end. Take advantage of the chat, since you cannot speak up through the phone. We will try to look through those and answer as many as we can. I have a little cold , hopefully you will be able to understand me well enough. I want to do a fly through. This is not going to be a deep dive into anything, but hopefully enough to whet the appetite to pursue conversations going forward. We are looking at a historic overview, my perception of where we have been and where we are. When we started, this was the for Google maps. We were interested in being accurate and current, acquiring data from authoritative sources and making the data available as quickly as possible. That is still a goal and a concept we keep in the forefront. It became apparent there was a need to add consistency to that data. It was not enough to come from authoritative sources, it needed to be consistent across data models so folks could use that to enable science and user input of that data. The emphasis became a national consistent data model and maps. At that time, Google maps had come out. Web mapping had emerged. Everyone had a client. We did, as well. We had multiple clients define particular data. The emphasis is to have a single access point. It has been the access viewer . You can access the data from that single point. That is becoming commonplace. People can mash up clients easily. We are looking at an exciting time where we are at the point we can look at enabling usage of the data through our products services and API's, but other clients, we have a great demo from Camille illustrating that. Probably do not want to see that. Moving on, an outline of what I want to cover. Enabling through our products. They are seen braced -- they are theme- based, pregenerated products. We talk about the different kinds of services we offer and another form of service, the API itself. We will start with staged products. Data is central to what we do. Currently, what we do is we know that you do not want the full data set. We saw ice that up into different extents. Maybe it is national, state, some grid, or even just project areas. We divide that data set up and make it available in various formats. That is the idea of pre-generating that so it is ready to download. I am providing some links you will have access to in the slides. If you are interested in pursuing, there are a list of data sets. They can be accessed through a JSON type database. There are catalogs in sciencebase.gov. We plan on migrating products from our FTP servers to the clouds, beginning this year. That will hopefully help our reliability since Amazon is available during the weekends and some government workers usually take off Friday afternoon. We will increase our reliability and hopefully see a performance gain by going to the cloud with our products. I have included some screenshots here of, not to be confused with Amazon cloud or network cloud, the Lidar Point Cloud. It is a 3-D look at elevation. It is everything in between. Even birds show up in some of these. We are talking about a data set that is huge. It is the first chance we have had dealing with big data. It is still a challenge. We are not sure how we are going to provide access to that in an optimal way. Stay tuned for what is coming in that respect. Moving on to map services. I want to draw attention to the fact we offer five base maps. They are pregenerated tiles , cached maps that combine many data sets to produce a map product that is multiscale, takes advantage of the symbology and photography -- and cartography that we think is best at different scales. There are five of those available. We have dynamic based map services that pick up the gap in between. For each of our theme d data sets, we have a dynamic overlay and we have availability index. I will show you examples of those. The interface is available through these web map services. Links to where you would find information about those services are included at the bottom of this slide. These are screenshots of our five base maps. We have a hydro-based map that shows hydrologic features. An imagery topo map that shows the backdrop and contours. These are multiscale. One service you plug-in and you have they based map that is cached and optimized for viewing. USGS Topo we just revised. We have an imagery only and a Hillshade. That is our five base maps. We have overlay services for each theme. I li sted those to the side so you can get a little flavor of that. This is a few screenshots of our availability services. Where we do not have complete coverage of data, we want to make it evident where data exists and what that data involves and what kind of attributes are present. Keep that in mind. Availability and index services. There is a lot of information and we expose that information through a number of API's. TNMAccess mashes up the information we need to tie all of that data together. That is available from a rest interface. ScienceBase is a public search interface. It has an HTML interface and allows you to query and filter. We use that for search mechanisms for products. Data.gov and GeoPlatform also have copies of our metadata , so you can discover data through that. The point is, a lot metadata information and what we have done, rather than build our own custom viewer, we want to exercise those API's and build our own clients to illustrate you can do this as well. We enable that through the API's , access to all the information we have about products and services. This is a bulk clients. There is a link you can go to. There is a mobile clients. We just put together again to exercise the API and show we could use those API's to build a download function for our products. Another view of a different shopping cart experience, where you select and move around on the map, the results are constantly changing. It is kind of like a Zappos shopping experience. You continue to refine your search. We are interested in not just exposing one viewer, but all of the necessary information through the API's so others can use that data to build their own clients and do the work that is required. This is our TopoV iew client. An example of taking one of our products and providing a richer interface to understand the lineage of the maps. You have a slider you can move back and forth and see when products came into existence. Another example of building a specialized client using the existing services. I will finish here with -- there is a lot of information out there. We want people to come to a location where they can find the latest information. This launch page would be a good page to bookmark and visit and see the updates and the things going on. We should have a link to all of our list of products, services, and some of the applications. We will fill in more documentation as time goes on. Make note of that. I think that is the end of my slides.

Brian: Rick, thank you. A reminder -- we will have these slides posted to the Internet. You can data mine those for all of the links and additional information. Rick, thank you. We are going to pass the ball over to Camille. Are you set?

Camille: I am ready.

Brian: thank you for presenting. He has a neat mobile app on Droid. Taken away.

Camille: I will start with a quick overview of the application and make a quick live demo. AlpineQuest is a mobile application that can display digital maps and stores them on the device so they can be used even if there is no cell phone. -- cell phone range. Having access to the USGS map is great. The USGS provides topographic maps, which are more useful in the wild than the classical roadmaps. The maps have been used and known for years. Users find the same maps again on their device when they go digital. The USGS maps are provided for free. It does not rely on ads or revenue , that we can find in some private companies. Finally, from a technical point of view, the maps are easy to use because USGS uses protocols and all of the -- is done by the USGS on their servers. We have to download and display the maps. It does not require a lot and it is important for mobile applications. We have limited resources. I am going to show you what it looks like on the device. On the right side of the screen you can see the main application screen. I am going to click on the maps and here are the USGS maps. You do not have to do anything. I will start with the USGS map. The application downloads the map and displays it so we can zoom into any location. The application will download it. It is easy to have access to any part of the USA. There are various tools you can use. If you activate the device GPS, you can look at real time on the map. Right now, it does not work because I am not outside. All of these basic mapping functions and tools are the light version of AlpineQuest, which is completely free and ad-free. Anyone can get the app from the Google place store and have access to USGS maps in seconds. There is a built in compass. If your device comes with some sort of barometer. You can save and restore locations. It is easy to move anywhere. I am going to go back to the mapping function. On the main map , usually you do not find those maps, a mix of contour and imagery. Someone asked me for this map with a contour map that was a bit more flashy. You can build your own map . If you start by displaying the simple imagery map, you can add on top, the contours layer. It will be added on top of the maps. It will not replace the map. I am going to reduce the opacity of this layer. You can add the road names. I am going to reduce, a little bit, the opacity of this. What you can do is edit the color. By increasing the contrast of this and the color , you can change the color of the layout so you can see what you want . The application will update everything. This is made by using different layers and maps already generated by the USGS. You just have to display and choose what you want to see. You can save the configuration, for example, I am going to save it as USGS. It allows you to go back on any of the map view. In one click, it restores everything. I am going to finish with another tool. Instead of sliding the map, everything is stored on the device. You cannot -- to be sure everything is stored, you can select the area, select the maximum level of detail and the application will download the area. You will have all of this area stored. You will have access to your maps. Thank you very much for your attention and giving me the opportunity to show you this application.

Brian: thank you. I hope everyone appreciates his use of our services and a creative way within the mobile realm. Camille, thank you. He also demonstrates -- he is French, living in the U.K.. It enables folks within the U.S. or the continental U.S. and enables development throughout the world. There are a number of mobile developers in Europe that are leveraging our services. Thank you very much. With that, I will pass the ball to Rick Brown. Camille, did you have anything else?

Camille: I just wanted to thank you for making the maps. They are great maps and they are useful for us. Thank you.

Brian: Absolutely.

Rick: Thanks, Camille. So far, I see one question. I was wondering if you need authentication to connect to the base map services? I am going to be honest, I do not know the answer to that right off because of the way that is worded. We will look into that and post and answer. Our services are available through the rest interface, publicly and without need for authentication. They are also SSL enabled, so you can use it in a secure environment. Through the other connection, I will have to check into that.

>> I am checking with our I.T. department right now.

Brian: If there are any other questions? Here they come. Put them in the chat feature and we will answer those until our half hour is up. All of the questions and answers will be posted on the website after this. Rick, it looks like there is another question. It came to me privately. If you have a question, publish to everyone. Any question of the most recently published paper topos appearing as an art GIS map service?

Rick: That is a great question. It gets asked a lot. Rob, I do not know if you are on and want to answer that.

Rob: I will give it a shot. Right now, our map services that we have our partner companions with U.S. topo. It is designed for a different purpose. We will continue to explore other ways. We are looking at technology to make it available. We would like to duplicate cartography, but there are different rules and challenges. We will continue to be evaluating. Right now, there are two different products. One of the things, product design is to turn on and off all the layers. We are continuing to look and tried to get the best capabilities for different users. Whether it is standalone PDF's or our map services designed for interactive mobile use. Not a definite plan or time frame, but things we are continuing to work on.

>> that does continue to be a question asked. We are looking at is that a solution to some of the ca ching issues we have had and can we take advantage of the U.S. topos for at least the 24,000 deal and right around there. Adam did say he did not believe the credentials were required when making that connection through ArcGIS. Please give it a whirl and let us know. Any other questions?

Brian: Not seeing any other questions and we have come up at the end of the hour. ICA comment from -- I see a comment from Melanie. Thank you. Appreciate it. One last question -- do you post instructions on the webpage to access map services through Arc Catalog or ArcMap? We will take that one off-line and answer that through the FAQs. I will go ahead and take the ball back here. Clear my screen and close us out. Here are some links that are available. Links out to our website, as far as where we will post information on the bottom here. There is a link to our services list. Overall, I want to thank AlpineQuest, Camille, thank you for coming in as our guest to show how you are leveraging USGS services. Rob , thank you for helping facilitate this question and answering some questions. Rick and Adam, thank you for your part in this. Everyone who attended, thank you. If you have any feedback, there is my e-mail address. Give us about a week and you should see information on the Internet as far as this webinar goes. Thank you for your time. We appreciate it. We will meet again soon. Thanks.