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Home > Geospatial Solutions/Spatial Data Distribution

Central to CAST’s mission is promotion of the integration and use of geospatial technologies for research and decision support in academia, government and the private sector. In addition to providing experienced practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines, CAST has acquired or developed an enormous suite of geospatial data, hardware and software resources that it makes available to the wider community. A multi-year research project resulted in the deployment of GeoStor, an enterprise geospatial data warehouse that includes web-based data discovery and delivery, and support for multiple applications, built on an integrated Oracle enterprise-class distributed database. The initial research project evolved into the operational GeoStor system for the State of Arkansas, operated by the Arkansas Geographic Information Office (AGIO). CAST, as a university R/D unit did not plan to become involved in a 24/7 operational system and efforts were made to relocate the system to the AGIO’s office over a number of legislative sessions.  In 2005 the AGIO staff, in cooperation with Safe Software, Oracle, ESRI and the Arkansas Department of Information Systems, began the development of a completely new version and architecture for GeoStor.  Effective 17 January 2006 the Arkansas GeoStor system V5, developed by the AGIO, is on-line and operated by that office on servers supported by the Arkansas Department of Information Systems in Little Rock. A new system, called the University of Arkansas' Spatial Library (UASL) has started operation.

In addition to the publicly available Arkansas data in GeoStor, CAST has an extensive suite of limited distribution data sets including IKONOS, Digital Globe, and other commercial data. These are available for research and teaching for U of A faculty and students. Increasingly data sets from around the world are being added to the Center database. Examples include complete Shuttle Radar Topographic Mapping data.

CAST staff are working closely with NASA to develop MesoStor, Mesoamerica ’s first free on-line data delivery system that allows anybody with an Internet connection to seamlessly access digital map data of the region (satellite imagery, roads and river coverages, etc.). MesoStor is part of the SERVIR "One Stop Shop" for regional data, dynamic maps, decision support, and interactive visualizations.