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Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies

University of Arkansas

University of Arkansas Spatial Library

Home » Research » Digital Library and Data Archives » University of Arkansas Spatial Library

The University of Arkansas Spatial Library (UASL) was a massive (multi-terabyte) Oracle database holding a wide range of geospatial data sets in an OGC-compliant interoperable form. There were extensive vector (e.g. roads, soils, CAD, etc.), raster (e.g. imagery, elevation), and 3D (e.g. LIDAR, high density survey) data in the system. Information from many areas of the world were in the system -- with major holdings from Arkansas, various locations around the US, Central and South America and the Near East. The system was structured to support the research, development, teaching and outreach efforts of the faculty and students of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Faculty and students across the campus could connect a range of GIS, remote sensing, CAD and surveying desktop clients to the Oracle data. Both limited access and public data sets were stored in the UASL. Depending on your access privileges you may be restricted in the data you can access.

The University of Arkansas Spatial Library (UASL) was initiated in late 1998 as a two year research project ,Seamless Warehouse of Arkansas Geodata (SWAG), funded through the Governor’s Telecommunications and Technology Infrastructure Fund. The Department of Information Services, Office of Information Technology under the direction of Ms. Susan Cromwell, administered the project and provided guidance and direction throughout the initiative. The objective of this research was to create an Internet accessible database or warehouse that could deliver geographic data, suitable for use in a range of geographic information systems, to the desktop machines in state agencies, local government offices and to teachers and students in K-12 education throughout the state. In addition, it was hoped that this warehouse could serve as a resource to the general public accessed from home computers and/or through public outlets such as libraries.

UASL was conceived and was developed with a strong emphasis on standards and open computing models that promote the broadest possible usage via "published interfaces". Such an open environment was to enable multiple, often competing members of the private sector to provide different software solutions that can "work together" by accessing the same store of data. In the case of UASL the OpenGIS© Consortiums developing framework for interoperable geoprocessing was a critical factor. This focus on OpenGIS was reflected in the wide range of private sector "stakeholders" that have invested in this project and in the capacity of UASL to provide data in formats that were suitable for use in a range of geographic information system software products. UASL, as it was originally envisioned, was to provide a broad audience with uniform access to an evolving digital library of geospatial data while providing the state with a mechanism to manage its growing investment in and reliance on digital geographic resources. UASL provided the basic components of OpenGIS and perhaps other requirements associated with the use of digital geospatial data in Arkansas.

In the late 1998s the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) completed development of the Seamless Warehouse of Arkansas Geodata (SWAG). Under an agreement with and support from the Arkansas Geographic Information Office (AGIO) the SWAG project became the Arkansas GeoStor System. The Arkansas GeoStor system was operational at CAST through June 2005 and provided free access to both vector and raster GIS data with over 350,000 downloads.   

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 Release 6 , 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. The operation of the earlier version of GeoStor, managed by CAST and located on the campus of the University of Arkansas, has been terminated. A new system, called the University of Arkansas’ Spatial Library (UASL) was started and remained in operation until 2008. In addition to serving academic and private research communities with access to a wide variety of worldwide geospatial data layers, UASL also provided a research and development platform for CAST to test new database architectures.