The initial version of the site was specifically tailored for scientists, managers and decision-makers. More recent and expanded versions of the site have added educational materials and general outreach items designed for the general public. The number of visitors to the site has increased from just under 80 per day in 1998 to over 1400 visitors/day in early 2003. The SOFIA site has grown tremendously since its inception and currently contains over 5500 documents.
The objective of the SOFIA website is to continue to provide a usable and Section-508-compliant website that provides direct access to all South Florida Place-Based Studies information. Every effort is made to ensure that the SOFIA site is usable and accessible, though usability testing, link verification, and checking for Section 508 compliance.
Work continued on the creation of new materials for the SOFIA site. This involved creating new project pages, adding publications, and posting materials for the Joint Florida Bay/Greater Everglades Ecosystem Restoration science forum in April 2003. We will also continue to add relevant south Florida information, including materials from sources outside of the PES program.
As in previous years, demonstrations of the website will be given at various meetings, conferences, and open houses. In addition, the SOFIA site staff works with the students of the Academy of Science and Technology at Forest Hill High School in West Palm Beach, Florida, helping to create and post research projects and related educational information. Please see <http://sofia.usgs.gov/forest_hill/>.
The data exchange and metadata portions of the SOFIA site will be demonstrated alongside the rest of the website at a variety of conferences, forums, and workshops.
SOFIA web portal Work will continue on the creation of new materials for the SOFIA site. This will involve creating new project pages, adding work plans, summary sheets, and publications. We will also continue to add relevant South Florida information, including materials from sources outside of the PES program. In FY05, we will once again post relevant materials for the National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration.
Work will continue in helping design the SOFIA Internet Map Service (IMS), in cooperation with Roy Sonenshein.
SOFIA data dissemination Work will continue with the addition of metadata records in cooperation with Jo Anne Stapleton (SOFIA Metadata project). New and previously created data sets will also be added to the site. We also plan on enhancing the data exchange site to help better organize the information provided.
In December, 2004 at the First National Conference on Ecosystem Resotration (NCER), SOFIA personnel demonstrated an updated publications website which included a more specialized, searchable interface. The database-driven website allows users to search our online publications by author, title, date, publication type, and topic.
Updates to the SOFIA website (publications, data, metdata, staff, and project information) continued throughout the year.
The SOFIA website has been invited to be part of GeoData.gov, a public gateway for improving access to geospatial informaiton and data under the Geospatial One-Stop e-government initiative. We are currently evaluating GeoData.gov and expect to join by the end of 2004. GeoData.gov will provide another portal through which users can find data and metadata on the SOFIA website.
Materials will be posted for GEER, NCER, and other conferences as appropriate.
Work has been completed for upgrades to the software components needed for an Internet Mapping Service (IMS) to function. Work will continue on completing the design of the geospatial interface and preparing the IMS for publishing to the web. Once an initial version is ready for review, a usability study will be conducted to see how user-friendly the site is. When that is completed, work will continue with other projects to populate the geospatial library with background data layers, develop data layers representing the location of USGS data collection sites and published USGS products such as geologic contour maps.
Work will be coordinated with the Everglades Depth Estimation Network (EDEN) project for posting materials related to that project on SOFIA.
U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, Center for
Coastal Geology
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