Geo Data Serivces
The Mountain GeoNetwork is a metadata management system developed by the International
Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) to promote access, use and sharing
of geo-information resources in the Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region. The system
is based on the GeoNetwork platform developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) in an open source software environment and adopted by many United Nations
(UN) organisations. The system promotes systematic development of metadata adhering
to international standards in a distributed and decentralised network environment.
In order to disseminate data, information and outputs generated in ICIMOD major
thrust areas, MENRIS division in ICIMOD has developed new and innovative methods
for interaction with the spatial, temporal and attribute components of geospatial
information through regional database application techniques. This interactive application
of socio-economic indicators, biodiversity, glacier databases, mash-up applications,
and real time satellite data integration are some key tools that are available under
this section.
ICIMOD is currently moving towards Enterprise GIS that facilitates the central storage
of all the geospatial data in relational database management system (RDBMS) allowing
concurrent access of these data to multiple users within and outside ICIMOD. The
ESRI’s ArcGIS Server that includes ArcSDE along with Microsoft’s SQL Server have
been used to implement ICIMOD’s Enterprise GIS.
The Web Map Service (WMS) allows serving spatial data in the form of images over
the internet. The WMS specification was developed by Open Geospatial Consortium
(OGC). The WMS basically supports three operations as described below: