Data Distribution

 

Other Research areas:

Over more than a decade, a range of research activities at CAST have led to the development of a number of useful datasets ranging from information on avian habitat in the US, conservation planning areas in South America, soils mapping and watershed information for Arkansas, land use and land cover for Central America and Arkansas to list a few. 

A major data asset for the state of Arkansas is the GeoStor system, Geostor was initially designed and developed at the Center but is now operated by the Arkansas Geographic Information Office.  GeoStor was the first state enterprise level system and its design and development earned Jim Farley, then of the Center, the 1999 Smithsonian-Computer World Innovation Network Award.  GeoStor was developed utilizing the Oracle spatial database structures.  A similar enterprise architecture was used in the successful MesoStor system developed for NASA as part of its Servir Project.  More recently the Center has focused its efforts on the University of Arkansas' Spatial Library.  Research now is on the extension of the enterprise geospatial database to non-traditional data formats such as laser point clouds (both aircraft and terrestrial), large volumes (multiple 10,000s) of imagery and networks.

 

In addition to the datasets that are available here, Stephan Pollard and associates have also developed extensive resource lists providing entry points to data access for Japan and the US.  The US resource, called "Starting the Hunt", is among the largest and most used "finding aids" for spatial data in existence.

Information on a variety of datasets available through CAST is provided in the links to the left.