The Open GIS Consortium has announced that Phase 2 of its Critical Infrastructure Protection Initiative (CIPI-2) has begun. CIPI aims to test the application of interoperable technology to help national, state, provincial, and other local governments, commercial, and non-government organizations better manage emergency situations. The initiative does this by coordinating geospatial data and services to meet critical infrastructure protection needs. The Geography Division of the U.S. Census Bureau is sponsoring CIPI-2 and will use OGC’s rapid-prototyping process to develop two prototype systems: an online system to update governmental unit boundary information for existing incorporated places, and a system based on OpenGIS Specifications for serving Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) data.
Through the CIPI-2 cooperative endeavor, participants will extend the implementation of OGC Web Services in their existing software products to support the Census Bureau’s
effort to modernize geospatial systems with a standards-based and interoperable solution. Participants will combine elements of existing standards-based commercial-off-the-shelf products to test and establish an interoperable baseline for two prototype systems, called
“WebBAS” and “WebTIGER”. The WebBAS system will allow Web-based update of geospatial features by state, county, local, municipal and/or tribal governments as a partial replacement for the current paper-based Boundary and Annexation Survey (BAS). The BAS is currently a paper-based survey that consists of map sheets, 12 forms, 8 letters, 2 postcards, and 12 inserts. The WebTIGER system will use a standards-based Web server to serve TIGER data and map images over the Web. The Census Bureau is exploring replacing TIGER/Line files with a non-proprietary, standards-based, extensible and flexible encoding format, GML. The Census Bureau is exploring this approach to encourage public adoption of TIGER/GML as an open, standards based encoding for TIGER data.
