An education and outreach atlas based on geographic infrastructure: Lessons learned from the development of an on-line polar atlas

Since 2002, the authors have been contributing to the establishment of a community-driven geospatial information infrastructure for the South Polar region. This infrastructure has been used to support the development of a prototype on-line atlas of Antarctica. The prototype will contribute to the establishment of an online polar atlas planned for release during the International Polar Year. Methods used to develop the geospatial information infrastructure underlying the atlas included community review, and adoption of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) specifications and standards. Standards and standards-based technologies were then used to develop a series-standard semantics and geospatial Web services. Interoperable semantics and services are being used to expose the framework and domain-specific data sets serving The Atlas. Efforts to establish a geospatial information infrastructure for the Antarctic region have resulted in a series of baseline standards and services for delivering framework data sets. In addition, community semantics in the form of an ISO-compliant feature catalogue and a related geo-ontology now exist. Research related to developing The Atlas has resulted in a widely available open-source, atlas-development framework The discussion includes lessons learned in relation to the establishment of a community of practice, adoption of standards and development processes. The paper concludes with a review of current and future research and development activities, in the context of developing a geospatial information infrastructure for the Canadian North. Included are discussions highlighting existing applications related to community development, resource monitoring, environmental management and supporting sovereignty claims in the Canadian North