Services

Custom GIS Applications

ASA has provided custom GIS-based solutions to federal clients, international governments, and large industrial clients. ASA combines a unique set of skills; highly advanced GIS expertise, innovative computer science expertise, and domain knowledge of the environmental issues and regulations facing energy initiatives through its team of Ph.D. scientists.

ASA has extensive experience with the integration and implementation of commercial GIS, open-source GIS, open standards (OGC and others), and relational databases to implement solutions for a wide variety of ocean, coastal, atmospheric, and land based problems. Some of the solutions include search and rescue, oil and chemical pollution, maritime response, ecological impact and risk assessment, water quality, and sediment re-suspension from dredging and port and harbor operations.

ASA focuses on solutions that eliminate the need for data providers to make changes to data. As a science company, ASA is constantly dealing with data from a variety of observation platforms, in-situ met-ocean measurements, water quality data, HF Radar, satellite-derived data, and operational models. ASA recognizes and manages the reality that data comes in a variety of formats from ASCII to relational databases to self-describing formats such as GRIB and NetCDF. By using web services to abstract the data, we can seamlessly connect users to data without the need for data duplication and reformatting.

ASA is considered a “middle-user” that bridges the gap between research activities, ocean observing initiatives, and government data with end-users with operational needs. An example of this role (described in project summaries) is the Environmental Data Server (EDS) that was custom built for the U.S. Coast Guard and is now fully integrated into all search and rescue operations. An ASA operated, 24-7/365 monitored server collects and disseminates a vast amount of real-time observation and forecast data for regional, national, and global purposes.  This server configuration is located at our company headquarters in Rhode Island as well as inside the U.S. Coast Guard Operations System Center (OSC). (ASA has also built a version of the EDS for the U.S. Navy.) The EDS serves data in a variety of formats and has an option for OGC services that supports an Environmental Common Operational Picture (ECOP).

ECOP features include:

• Server side processing
• Uses Open Standards so can be consumed by various clients, web clients, desktop clients, Google Earth, etc.
• Draws directly from the data sources, no data conversion
• Supports a wide variety of existing data sources on EDS and any new ones that may be added
• Supports multi-parameters, U, V, Temperature, Visibility, Sea State, etc.
• Also drifting buoys, vessel tracks (AIS), etc.
• Supports time-based requests
• Thresholding tools and custom-rendering
• Configuration management uses relational database
• Caching for improved performance

ASA is world-renowned for GIS solutions that demonstrate interoperability between traditional GIS technology, the latest web technologies, including web services, and industry standard oil and chemical spill modeling tools. ASA has been a leader in developing solution-based GIS applications for over 25 years. ASA has developed and deployed several multi-access point systems that allow GIS administrators, subject matter experts, managers/planners and the general public to uniquely access a given data system to augment, manipulate, visualize and analyze GIS information.

Additionally, ASA has been an ESRI business partner for over 10 years and has built innovative ESRI extensions for clients such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and major oil companies such as Shell, AGIP, ExxonMobil, and ADNOC. ASA has experience building desktop extensions and custom server applications with ArcIMS and ArcGIS Server.

Example Web-Client application custom built for the Royal Danish Administration of Navigation and Hydrography to serve observation and model data to the public.