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PDC Geospatial Information Services

PDC Geospatial Information Services equip disaster managers, planners, governments, and non-governmental organizations with real-time access to map services. PDC is committed to supporting a wide range of OGC and industry standards for the widest range of interoperability. At present, PDC publishes mapservices in WMS, WFS, KML, and WCS formats from OGC, as well as ESRI's ArcGIS Server and ArcIMS. Read more...

PDC map services can be instantly incorporated into GIS analytical software packages and decision support environments. PDC is committed to fostering data sharing worldwide by serving the data holdings of our organization and those of our data partners according to best-in-class interoperability standards and protocols. The Global Hazards Information Network (GHIN), powered by PDC's geospatial data management environment, is publicly available, enabling access to a wide range of high-quality geospatial data resources, including PDC's map services. For more information on GHIN, visit http://www.pdc.org/ghin/.

To connect to PDC map services, follow these steps:

1. Find a map service

PDC publishes metadata describing the map services and application that are available online. This metadata can be viewed at the Global Hazards Information Network website: http://www.pdc.org/ghin/.

To see a full list of map services, click on the Browse tab in the banner. On the left sidebar, the last hyperlink in the "Categories" list is "services". Click on that hyperlink to see all of the Live Data and Maps and Applications.

To search on a specific keyword (e.g. tsunami), click on the Browse tab in the banner. In the search form on the left sidebar, choose a content type of "Live Data and Maps" and enter a keyword.

2. Determine what services are offered

Once you have located a map service of interest in the previous step, click on the View Details button for that entry. Near the bottom of the page is a section called "Spatial Data Information", which describes the data format(s) in which the map service is available. Note whether the service is published with ArcGIS Server or ArcIMS (or both). Just below that, the "Access and Usage Information" section provides connection information (URL, map service name, etc).

3. Connect to the service

In the previous step, you determined the map service name, the connection information, and server type (ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server). Use that information to connect to the map service with the following instructions:

4. Sign up for notifications about important updates

Go to http://elists.pdc.org and select the link "PdcServiceUpdates" to subscribe. This subscription is a low-volume mailing list (1-2 announcements in a typical month) where PDC posts updates related to new data services and changes to existing services. Notifications are sent approximately one week prior to the roll-out of any changes that could disrupt automatically consuming the map services.

For more information:

Requested Citation

PDC prefers to have its services cited using, where practicable, the triangle-only graphic seen below, and—with or without that graphic—the following statement:

Data from Pacific Disaster Center, http://www.pdc.org/ghin/.

The word "data" in the citation may be replaced with Some data, Layers, Layer x, etc. as appropriate.

PDC triangle 100px by 83px
100px by 83px