Project Work Plan

Funding History: FY98; FY99; FY00; FY01; FY02; FY03; FY04; FY05; FY06

Principal Investigator(s): Heather Henkel
Study Personnel: Tracy Enright, Kathy Pegram
Supporting Organizations: None
Associated / Linked Studies:

Overview & Objective(s): The South Florida Information Access (SOFIA) system was created by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in 1995. Its mission is to provide easy access to information about research projects and products generated as part of USGS South Florida Priority Ecosystems Studies (GE PES) and other Federal, state, and local science providers. SOFIA provides this service by integrating information systems and tools enabling efficient storage, organization, and search and retrieval of scientific information about the south Florida ecosystem. SOFIA was designed to benefit three major user groups: USGS program managers and scientists working with South Florida GE PES, managers and scientists working for other organizations involved with Everglades restoration, and members of the public interested in USGS research and/or the science behind the Everglades restoration effort.

SOFIA is an evolving and dynamic system that builds on the ever-increasing sophistication of new information technology. The current architecture consists of four integrated components: website, data, metadata, and the soon to be released internet map server (IMS). The SOFIA website (http://sofia.usgs.gov/) contains links to project descriptions, proposals, publications, data (through links to our data exchange site), metadata, presentations, and contact information, as well as general interest items, including photographs and posters. In addition, the SOFIA team has worked with outside agencies (such as the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) and the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge) to post related material on the site.

Specific Relevance to Major Unanswered Questions and Information Needs Identified:
The south Florida restoration effort requires multidisciplinary information related to present and historical conditions for use in responsible decision-making. The SOFIA website provides centralized, seamless access to all information produced by the USGS GE PES program, as well as other related information produced outside of the program.

Status: In the past year, the SOFIA website has continued to post all relevant south Florida information, including project proposals, work plans, summary sheets, status reports, publications, data, metadata, as well as project and personnel information. SOFIA continues to increase the amount of information that is provided on the website. The SOFIA website currently contains over 6800 documents. SOFIA also continues to see an increase in the number of visitors from just under 80 per day in 1998 to over 3000 in 2005.

Recent Products: In January of 2004, SOFIA started producing “SOFIA News.” SOFIA News is a bimonthly email update of new postings on the SOFIA website. These updates include announcements of new publications and data sets, new and continuing project information, notification of upcoming meetings, as well as other related information. Currently, SOFIA News has 256 subscribers.

This summer, SOFIA developed a website for the A.R.M. Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge Enhanced Water Quality Monitoring and Modeling Program. This website, available at http://sofia.usgs.gov/lox_monitor_model/, contains information about the program reports, and links to other related information. We continue to work with the Program to post relevant and related information for their site.

The amount of content continued to increase during the past year, including additions to our data exchange site, publications, project pages, and other related content.

Planned Products: Development has begun on version 1.0 of the SOFIA IMS, which is expected to be available by the end of 2005 (see task 4). In addition, work has started in support of the Everglades Depth Estimation Network (EDEN) project in the form of IMS and website assistance.

B. WORK PLAN

Title of Task 1: SOFIA Web Portal
Task Funding: USGS Greater Everglades Priority Ecosystems Science (GE PES)
Task Leaders: Heather Henkel
Phone: (727) 803-8747 ext. 3028
FAX: (727) 803-2032
Task Status (proposed or active): active
Task priority: High
Task Personnel: Heather Henkel, Tracy Enright (contractor), Kathy Pegram (contractor)
Task Summary and Objectives: The task summary is the same as the project summary. Our objectives are to continue to provide a robust, accurate, and accessible website for South Florida Priority Ecosystems Studies (GE PES).

Work to be undertaken during the proposal year and a description of the methods and procedures:
Work will continue on the creation of new materials for the SOFIA site. This will involve creating new project pages, adding workplans, proposals, summary sheets, and publications. We will also continue to add relevant south Florida information, including materials from sources outside of the GE PES program as was done with the A.R.M. Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge Enhanced Water Quality Monitoring and Modeling Program. In FY06, we will once again post relevant materials for the second Ecosystem Restoration Conference. At this conference, the SOFIA System will be demonstrated to conference attendees.

Specific Task Product(s): Updates to the entire site (publications, data, metadata, staff and project information) will continue throughout the year. Development on the SOFIA publications database will continue.

Title of Task 2: SOFIA Data Dissemination
Task Funding: USGS Greater Everglades Priority Ecosystems Science (GE PES)
Task Leaders: Heather Henkel
Phone: (727) 803-8747 ext. 3028
FAX: (727) 803-2032
Task Status (proposed or active): active
Task priority: High
Task Personnel: Heather Henkel, Tracy Enright (contractor), Kathy Pegram (contractor)
Task Summary and Objectives: In addition to the project and publication information provided on the SOFIA site, we also provide easy access to data and supporting metadata (see Task 3). The data exchange site http://sofia.usgs.gov/exchange/) provides direct access to a variety of data sets within the SOFIA program. These data sets are organized by topic and include site maps and methodology information. Access to Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)-compliant metadata is made available through both the SOFIA site (http://sofia.usgs.gov/metadata) and a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) node. Our objectives are to continue to add all available data and metadata to the SOFIA site.

Work to be undertaken during the proposal year and a description of the methods and procedures: Work will continue with the addition of new data records including those from USGS publications. In FY06, we will be adding a new section to the Data Exchange pages. This section will include GIS data layers as well as maps showing the location of each GIS layer.

Specific Task Product(s): We will continue to add all new and existing available datasets.

Title of Task 3: SOFIA Metadata Maintenance
Task Funding: USGS Greater Everglades Priority Ecosystems Science (GE PES)
Task Leaders: Heather Henkel
Phone: (727) 803-8747 ext. 3028
FAX: (727) 803-2032
Task Status (proposed or active): active
Task priority: High
Task Personnel: Heather Henkel, Jo Anne Stapleton (contractor)
Task Summary and Objectives: The south Florida restoration effort requires multidisciplinary information relating to present and historical conditions for use in responsible decision-making. Numerous data sets have been created as a result of USGS research conducted in support of the south Florida restoration effort. Metadata provide information for discovering, assessing, and accessing the data sets. The objective is to have accurate, current, FGDC-compliant, searchable metadata for all projects and data sets posted on the South Florida Information Access (SOFIA) website.

Access to Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)-compliant metadata is made available through the four outlets: the SOFIA site (http://sofia.usgs.gov/metadata), a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) node, the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) website, and the Federal Geospatial One-Stop website (Geodata.gov).

This task will oversee the maintenance of existing SOFIA metadata records as well as the creation of new records.

Work to be undertaken during the proposal year and a description of the methods and procedures: Work planned involves updating as much of the metadata for existing SOFIA projects as possible. The metadata will be generated using COTS software (SMMS from Intergraph Corp.) and processed through the metadata parser to ensure compliance with the FGDC metadata standard.

Specific Task Product(s): New and updated metadata records.

Title of Task 4: SOFIA Internet Map Server (IMS) Development
Task Funding: USGS Greater Everglades Priority Ecosystems Science (GE PES)
Task Leaders: Heather Henkel
Phone: (727) 803-8747 ext. 3028
FAX: (727) 803-2032
Task Status (proposed or active): active
Task priority: High
Task Personnel: Heather Henkel
Task Summary and Objectives: The South Florida restoration effort requires multidisciplinary information relating to present and historical conditions for use in responsible decision-making. Currently, the SOFIA web site has a minimal geospatial interface which relies on the Geo-Data Explorer (GeoDE) system developed by the USGS Energy Resources Program in Reston. A geospatial interface using currently available commercial software (ArcIMS) is needed to develop a more easily maintained and user-friendly interface. Developing an interface that is directly connected to the SOFIA website and existing data sets will provide a more stable long term solution to providing a geospatial interface. Initial development has already begun on the IMS, but further improvement is needed before the IMS website can be provided to the public.

Work to be undertaken during the proposal year and a description of the methods and procedures: Work has already been completed for upgrades to the software components that are needed for the IMS to function. Next, work will continue on completing the design of the geospatial interface and preparing the IMS for publishing it to the web. Once an initial version is ready for review (end of 2005), a usability study will be conducted to see how user-friendly the site is. Once that is completed, we will work with other projects to populate the geospatial library with background data layers from existing data layers, develop data layers representing the location of USGS data collection sites and published USGS products, such as geologic contour maps.

Work will also be coordinated with the EDEN project in later FY05 for posting materials related to that project. This will include IMS development and GIS layer creation.

Specific Task Product(s): SOFIA Internet Map Server (IMS).