Finding geodata that otherwise would have been forgotten- GeoXchange: a SDI-based portal for sharing free geodata

A key problem of small organizations like departments of geography, ecology, geodesy, architecture, landscape planning, archeology etc is, that they also produce - from time to time - some spatial data - mostly in small projects or master theses or PhD thesis. This data is usually not included in any spatial data infrastructure. Therefore we developed a GeoPortal - the geoXchange Portal - that gives the possibility to store, annotate and share such geodata produced by small institutions that do not have the resources to build up a SDI on their own. The portal is realized using open standards of OGC, ISO and W3C. It allows describing the geodata sets with metadata according to ISO 19115 (CORE) - as well as Dublin Core. This metadata can be queried using a Web Interface to an OGC conformant Catalog Service (CSW) and also using a graphical map interface (bounding-box) through a Web Map Service (WMS). Geodata itself can be uploaded to the portal directly though a transactional Web Feature Service (WFS) through which it also can be accessed. Uploaded data is made automatically available via the map query interface, too, in order to allow visual queries.