ACADEMIA

ESRI announces that at the recent Norwegian User Conference, Olaf Ostensen, chairman of ISO/TC 211, and ESRI President Jack Dangermond opened the Norwegian prototype portal for geographic information and services. The ISO/TC 211 Geographic Information/Geomatics committee is responsible for the ISO geographic information set of standards. The decision to develop a portal was in response to the Norwegian Parliament's June 2003 white paper Digital Norway, which called for a national portal for geographic information and services. The prototype portal was implemented by Norwegian ESRI distributor Geodata AS, together with the Norwegian Mapping Authorities (NMA) and based on ESRI's Portal Development Toolkit. Ostensen is the director of the National Geographic Information Center (NGIS), which is within the NMA and is responsible for the technological implementation of the national geospatial infrastructure. He says, "The choice of platform was based on the toolkit's openness and support for several international standards as well as availability and functionality." Roy Mellum, NMA portal project manager, says that the portal will be a joint effort in which a number of national and local government organizations will contribute to the portal's content and further development. The portal contains several important functions such as publishing capabilities, catalog services, ArcExplorer Web, metadata harvesting, and a national data sharing service from all main partners. Dangermond says, "This new portal is one of the first of its kind in the world. I am proud to have the opportunity to join Olaf Ostensen in opening the Norwegian portal. As chairman of ISO/TC 211, he is a key contributor to global standardization in the geospatial area worldwide." This activity is also supported by several other government initiatives such as the eNorway 2005 plan that includes the national strategy for electronic content. A national program for the support of broadband for the Internet is another important initiative to support the national infrastructure for electronic information. For more information, contact Olbjørn Kvernberg, managing director, Geodata AS (telephone: 47-23-24-90-00, e-mail: olbjorn@geodata.no). For more than 30 years, ESRI has been the leading developer of GIS software with more than 300,000 clients worldwide. ESRI software is used in all 200 of the largest cities in the United States and in more than 60 percent of counties and municipalities nationwide. Headquartered in California, ESRI has regional offices throughout the United States, international distributors in more than 90 countries, and more than 1,600 business partners. ESRI's goal is to develop comprehensive tools that enable users to efficiently manage, use, and serve geographic information to make a difference in the world around them. ESRI also provides consulting, implementation, and technical support services. ESRI can be found on the Web at www.esri.com.