Forestry Application

The Challenges

Creating a national system of forestry-related information posed several challenges for its developers, including the need to:

1. Develop an infrastructure to support a large distributed community of practice in its efforts to disseminate spatial and non-spatial data across the organization.
   
   
2. Create and maintain a searchable metadata registry.
   
   
3. Add a security model to cover distributed access control.

The following are the developement principles that guided NFIS staff.

Vendor neutrality is a fundamental design premise. Solutions will not require adopting agencies to buy into a particular vendor product, either at the level of application, server or operating system platform.

Low Cost of Entry. The cost of information systems components will be modest, with the opportunity for organizations to increase their participation and commitments through time.

Intellectual property rights to software and other developer deliverables will not normally be granted due to the need to share results amongst participating agencies and to allow these agencies to adapt and customize NFIS software components. The Crown may release intellectual property rights to the public domain in the interest of promoting the sharing of such deliverables.