NWGISS: The Web GIS Software Suite for Interoperable Access and Manipulation of EOS Data

NASA HDF-EOS Web GIS Software Suite (NWGISS) is a web-based data and information system that provides interoperable data accesses and services of HDF-EOS data to users. The software suite consists of a set of OGC standard compliant components, including a Web Map Server, a Web Coverage Server, a Catalog/Registries Server, a Multiple-protocol Geoinformation Client, and a Toolbox. Those components can work either independently or collaboratively. NWGISS can work with any HDF-4 based HDF-EOS data. The map server serves HDF-EOS data as maps to any OGC-compliant map clients. The coverage server allows GIS users to access multi-dimensional data at user specified geographic location, parameters, map projection, and formats in interoperable way. The catalog/registries server provides the catalog search capabilities to OGC-compliant catalog clients. The Multi-protocol Geoinformation Client enables users to access multi-source data served by OGC compliant web coverage, map, and feature servers and provides a set of data manipulation, processing, and analysis functions at user's desktop. The tool component consists of two-way translators between HDF-EOS and major GIS formats as well as the CreateCapabilities program that automatically creates the XML capability descriptions from the metadata in HDF-EOS. The combination of NWGISS servers and client provides interoperable, personalized, on-demand access and manipulation of EOS data to user community. Executables of all NWGISS components are free to any users and can be downloaded from http://laits.gmu.edu.