February 2025 Program Status Update¶
Building a Sustainable Geodata Repository: BTAA-GIN Pilot Phase Complete¶
The BTAA-GIN Geodata Pilot Workgroup has successfully completed its current phase, establishing the technical and metadata infrastructure for a scalable geospatial repository. Over the past year (Q1 2024–Q1 2025), the workgroup focused on building a framework for data curation, refining metadata standards, and improving workflow automation.
Key Accomplishments¶
- curated a pilot collection of 35 datasets on our development site to test our processes for gathering, describing, and sharing geospatial information
- added new metadata fields and entry guidelines to provide technical and administrative documentation for datasets
- created new methods for programmatically generating metadata and derivative files from collected datasets
- introduced new ways for users to evaluate datasets with visual previews and data dictionaries
Next Step¶
The next phase, Foundation (2025–26), will feature our activites to:
- partner with data providers to develop a process for exchanging resources
- continue to enhance the BTAA Geoportal and backend management tools
- curate real-world data submissions to build our first official collections
- release a formal plan that documents our goals, workflows, and guidelines
Program Activities¶
Committees¶
- Reviewed new item page design.
- Previewed the draft Strategic Technology Plan 2025-2026.
- Reviewed candidates for potential data preservation/rescue and discussed the benefits of establishing a workgroup to update the collection development policy.
- Shared a list of potential candidates for the geospatial data archiving pilot and government data rescue with the Tech Committee.
- Completed two sprints to storyboard videos introducing GIN and providing Geoportal walkthroughs.
- Proposed discussing and brainstorming at-risk state datasets for the geospatial data archiving pilot at the next Program Team meeting as well as initiating a workgroup to align this with our mission and workflows.
- Still seeking members for the Geospatial Data Citation group.
- Transactions in GIS CFP on spatial data sharing presents a potential publication opportunity tied to data citation, platform promotion, and data privacy, with a discussion planned for the 3/13 Program Team meeting.
- Reviewed drafts of two new documents
- Strategic Technology Plan 2025-2026
- Geodata Collection Groundwork Phase Report
- Onboarding of new members is ongoing. USC will participate in our monthly meetings until a final membership decision is made in July 2025.
- Our annual conference has a new name: Big Ten GIS Conference 2025. Promotion for the Call for Proposals & Maps begins this month.
Workgroups¶
Workgroup has been sunset and the final report has been published.
- Published revised metadata for maps; still need to add new metadata fields to Geoportal item page.
- May sunset the workgroup after next TECH Committee meeting.
- Draft survey in progress. Expected to circulate in the next month.
BTAA Geoportal¶
Analytics Statistics¶
January 2025 by the numbers
- Visitors: 6,324
- Visits: 7,174
- Downloads: 523
- Visits with download: 7.29%
- Outlinks: 2,484
- Visits with outlink: 34.63%
- Num. searches: 2,977
- Search keywords: 854
- Pageviews: 18,579
Unique visitors by month
More stats
See full statistics on our Analytics Dashboard
What Users are Looking for
-
Top Google searches leading to the Geoportal
- btaa geoportal
- ohio school district map
- south bend city limits
- franklin county school district map
- nj wetlands map
- 1937 aerial photographs wisconsin
- st. louis county gis mn
- maryland mile marker map
- how many states were there in 1800
- evansville city limits
-
Top internal keyword searches
- Redlining
- Bear
- Uses
- Hennepin county
- Sanborn
- Detroit
- Oregon forest
- Contaminated water
- Erosion
- wildlife
Collections¶
Total records as of March 1, 2025: 102,823
January Harvesting Activities¶
| Task | Records added | Records retired |
|---|---|---|
| Reharvest Minnesota Geospatial Commons February 2025 | 2 | 2 |
| Minnesota Geospatial Commons January 2025 | 0 | 1 |
| New Minnesota Digital Library: UMN Duluth | 41 | 0 |
| New Minnesota Digital Library: Stillwater | 22 | 0 |
| Washington State Open Data website record | 1 | 0 |
| Oregon GeoHub website record | 1 | 0 |
| Harvest Oregon GeoHub | 178 | 0 |
| 2025-01-21 Scan ArcGIS Hubs | 295 | 199 |
| 2025-02-04 Scan ArcGIS Hubs | 134 | 319 |
| 2025-02-11 Scan ArcGIS Hubs | 162 | 336 |
| 2025-02-18 Scan ArcGIS Hubs | 206 | 327 |
| 2025-02-25 Scan ArcGIS Hubs | 219 | 403 |
| Reharvest Wisconsin OpenGeometadata 2025-02 | 30 | 0 |
Web Development¶
New Features or Enhancements
- Geoportal Updates: Launched a new item view page redesign, added a Big Ten GIS Conference banner, updated Allmaps facets and sidebar tools, and upgraded to Rails 7.2.
- Rails 7.2 Upgrade: Provides about 1.5 years before Blacklight v7 and GeoBlacklight v4 reach the end of Rails' security support window.
- Conferences & Collaboration: Wrapped up the month at Stanford’s David Rumsey Map Center with discussions on IIIF, IIIF+Maps, and Allmaps, and gave a FastAPI+React demo to GeoBlacklight developers.
More development details