The National Air Photo Library (NAPL), part
of the Centre for Topographic Information
(CTI) and located in Ottawa, has over six
million aerial photographs covering all of
Canada, some dating as far back as the 1920s.
The National Air Photo Library functions as
an archive, a record centre and an order office
for photographs of Canada. NAPL was using
a manual process for searching for photographs
for companies, governments and individuals.
This manual method was time consuming, inefficient
and required extensive resources and maintenance,
so CTI sought the development and implementation
of a Web-based application for searching,
visualizing and retrieving data from the NAPL
database. The system was required to: be compliant
with the Web Map Services (WMS) standards
established by the Open GIS Consortium (OGC);
use the existing photo metadata organized
according to the Federal Geographic Data Committee
(FGDC) standards; and, provide customized
connectivity between the NAPL Oracle metadata
database and the GeoConnections Discovery
Portal.
Compusult provided components of its Web
Enterprise Suite software, data services and
professional services to migrate the manual
process to a Web-based automated environment.
A primary focus of the application was incorporating
the standards that are currently in use and
endorsed by the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure
(CGDI) and GeoConnections discovery portals.
