GINA is the University of Alaska’s mechanism for organizing and sharing its diverse data and technological capabilities among the Alaskan, Arctic, and world communities. Established in 2001 as an initiative of UA’s President, this network promotes collaboration at the local, state, and federal levels by increasing community-wide participation in the discovery and sharing of geospatial data. GINA’s services greatly expand the range of available research analysis capabilities in order to address the research, inventory, and monitoring needs of Alaska. GINA services include:

• Maintaining an enterprise-level, geographic information system (GIS) with online archiving, internet mapping, and metadata services.
• Offering training and assistance in satellite image processing, GIS, and visualization.
• Providing custom processing, server-side analysis, and visualization tools.
• Uniting and extending UA’s GIS and remote sensing activities through the use of internationally adopted standards and a shared web portal.

Here is a brief overview of services offered by GINA:

WEB MAPPING SERVICES 

Our Web Mapping Services (WMS) provides raster data to GIS clients. We provide a variety of interfaces to the WMS and are always interested in expanding the options for access data to the WMS services. Let us know if you need a new tiling scheme, or an alternative interface to our WMS feeds.

• GINA BDL:    
• wms.alaskamapped.org/bdl? 
• BDL Extras:    
• wms.alaskamapped.org/extras? 
• NOAA Nautical Charts: 
• wms.alaskamapped.org/charts? 
• NOAA Nautical Charts w/ Collars: (includes collor information)
• wms.alaskamapped.org/charts_nc?
• Alaska statewide ortho:
• wms.alaskamapped.org/ortho?

Download ESRI Layer files for the GINA Web Services

For more information about Web Mapping Services (WMS), Wikipedia has a excellent overview. A more detailed overview and the specifications for the WMS service is available from the OGC’s website.

Please let us know if you have any problems or questions!

Helpful Hints/Notes about WMS usage: 

If you can, set the image type of your WMS client uses to request JPEGs rather than PNGs. JPEGs are smaller so they will take less time in transit and will thus load faster.

Users with older versions of ArcGIS might be unable to change the image format to JPEG, then consider using our JPEG only service. The URLs for these services are wms.alaskamapped.org/jpeg/bdl for the Best Data Available layer and wms.alaskamapped.org/jpeg/extras for our Extras service.

WEB FEATURE SERVICE 

This service provides a Web Feature Service that allows access to information about the data available though GINA's WMS. This includes information about all of the data holdings in GINA data archive, such as license information, resolution, coverage, and method for obtaining the original data if the license allows.  More information on how to use the service can be found in our WMS and WFS tutorial

Please let us know if you encounter problems or have questions.

The URL for the service is wfs.alaskamapped.org/inventory.

WEB COVERAGE SERVICE 

Our Web Coverage Service provides raw data values to GIS clients and serves a number of elevation data sets. The Wikipedia article on WCS provides a useful overview of the WCS protocol.

This service is currently in a testing phase and we would appreciate feedback as to its usefulness. 

The URL for the service is wms.alaskamapped.org/cgi-bin/wcs_test.cgi

KML FEEDS 

Our Keyhole Markup Language (KML) feeds provide a variety of data to virual globe viewers like Google Earth. This data includes USGS Topographic Maps, imagrey data, MODIS Firepoints, and other interesting datasets. 

More details can be found on our KML page.

TILED SERVICES FOR WEB MAPPING 

GINA provides tiled services for use with web mapping frameworks like Open Layers, Google Maps, Bing Maps, and ESRI’s Flex Viewer. These services intended to provide base layers for web mapping mashups. 

 More details can be found at docs.gina.alaska.edu/tiles/

ArcGIS Online RESOURCES

GINA makes a subset of the tile services available as ArcGIS Online resources.  You can find a complete listing of the assets we have made available using a search for "owner:gina.uaf".   The tile data made available on that system is primarily based on requests by project partners, such as the Alaska Energy Data Initiative's 2011 Renewable Energy Atlas of Alaska available as an ArcGIS Online version as well as the GINA web map version.