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Happy October!
A Big Thank you!!!
The results are in! A big thank you to all who completed our Gateway experience survey. Your feedback is essential to our mission to continue providing Gateway users critical information. See below for a breakdown of some of the responses we collected.
Respondents:
7% private, 68% state government, 12% local government, 5% NGO, 5% academic, 2% public.
Focus Areas:
Atlantic Ocean 24%, Long Island Sound 32%, Great Lakes 54%, LI SSER 29%, LWRPs 63%, Mohawk River Watershed 27%.
Frequency of Use:
2% every day, 17% a few times a week, 5% once a week, 12% once a month, 41% a few times a year
Gateway by the numbers:
46% of respondents have utilized the “Stories” feature of the Gateway.
54% of respondents agreed that the Gateway provides an easy, intuitive experience.
44% of respondents have gotten more than they expected to out of their experience with the Gateway.
61% of respondents would recommend the Gateway to their peers and coworkers.
68% of respondents agreed that the Gateway provides information specific to their geographic areas of interest.
The average respondent valued the Gateway at about $4,000 per year.
Comments we’ve received:
“It’s a terrific resource, and excellent component of the state’s GIS resources.”
“It is one on several super resources for folks looking for geospatial data. Thank you for your hard work to make this happen.”
Thank you again to those who took the time to complete the survey, it was super helpful to us!
Happy Birthday!
This past Sunday, on September 29th, the Gateway celebrated its 4th year in operation! Over the past 4 years we’ve had visitors from 105 countries outside the U.S., 54% of the countries in the world today. All 50 states and 3 U.S. territories have visited the Gateway and on average we get visits from 28 states outside of New York and 14 countries every month. The Gateway is approaching 60,000 unique visitors since its launch. There have been over a quarter million pageviews, nearly three quarters of a million actions, and over 300,000 minutes or 5100 hours spent on the Gateway. On average we receive over 1220 visits and just over 5300 pages views a month.
A Little History and Background
History
On the occasion of the anniversary of the Gateway’s launch, we thought we’d share a brief history and background on the Gateway. The Gateway is lucky enough to be one of the few data portals around that is supported by a legislative mandate, Environmental Conservation Law (ECL), Article 14, the New York Ocean and Great Lakes Ecosystem Conservation Act of 2006 required creation of “…an ocean and coastal resources atlas to make information available to the public and decision-makers;” In response to that requirement, the Department of State, staff to the Council created by the act, launched the Ocean & Great Lakes Atlas in July 2008 with approximately 200 datasets and a few years later updated the Atlas data holdings to nearly 400 datasets. In December 2013 we kicked off work with our partners to overhaul, update and improve the Atlas. With significant improvements we rebranded the Atlas as the Geographic Information Gateway or just Gateway and released on September 29th 2015. The Gateway currently hosts over 700 datasets available for viewing and access by the public and decision-makers.
Partners
The Gateway Team relies on partnerships and maintains strong partnerships with other regional portals, such as the Northeast Ocean Data Portal, the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Data Portal and the MarineCadastre, sharing data back and forth. We also have close ties with the State’s GIS Program Office (GPO), host to the NYS GIS Clearinghouse and developer of the new ShareGIS platform project. The Clearinghouse is a good resource for NYS GIS datasets and serves the State’s GIS community well (the GPO’s clients), however there is no online mapping functionality that allows folks to visualize and explore the data. We collaborate with the GPO to deliver viewer functionality to the public and decision-makers (our clients) for some of the datasets on the Clearinghouse, for example NYS DEC Regulated Tidal Wetland maps.
Collaboration
*WARNING: GIS JARGON AHEAD* The ShareGIS project stands up a “hub”, of sorts, to provide authoritative NYS GIS data for pulling into or ”ingesting” desktop GIS applications without having to download the data or worry about “versioning” (in GIS jargon, this is referred to as “publishing map services”, which the Gateway does as well…that’s that little lightning bolt icon associated with each dataset). ShareGIS also services online GIS applications. The Gateway is a “client” of ShareGIS, that is, we “ingest” map services from ShareGIS and allow folks to visualize and, ingest if they have GIS capabilities of their own. As we celebrate the Gateway, we celebrate these partnerships as well!
New Datasets Added!
The Gateway continues to improve and grow as new information becomes available. Since August, the Gateway has added updated vessel traffic patterns from 2017 from all vessels that carry Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) transponders (2017 All Vessel Transit Counts). The Gateway now also includes new offshore Submarine Canyons that make up the global seafloor geomorphic features map. *TEST of your GIS JARGON*: We are ingesting both of these datasets through map services published by the Northeast Ocean Data Portal. You can see those datasets here.
Look for more data coming soon!
A Bug…A Glitch…An Anomaly…An ANNOYANCE!
Some of you may be experiencing a frustrating performance issue with the Gateway recently. It was brought to our attention that due to recent internet security protocols implemented by our Information Technology Service folks, the Gateway is tagged as using “unsafe scripts” and as a result the Gateway may not be fully opening when you click on links to the Gateway or entering it from search browsers. We believe that message regarding unsafe scripts is being generated because we don’t require folks to sign in to use the Gateway, as you all know, it’s free and open! What users have experienced, including us here at DOS: the Gateway banner shows, but the tabs don’t work and there is no content, just a white screen. Rest assured, the Gateway is not “down” or inoperable, and fortunately there is a fairly simple workaround for this issue. To return to fully functional operation follow these steps:
First, the Gateway functions best when opened in Google Chrome, it is optimized to work on many; IE, Safari, Mozilla Firefox…, but Chrome works closest to how we designed it.
If when following a link to the Gateway or entering from another site and the Gateway banner shows, but nothing else;
Notice in the Google Chrome banner above the Gateway banner, on the upper right side near the star icon for bookmarking pages…see that tiny red dot on the icon to the left of the star/bookmark icon (again, on the Google toolbar, not the Gateway banner)?
Click on that red dot…a pop-up window will show to warn you that this site has unsafe scripts and gives you the option of loading the unsafe scripts…go ahead and click the load unsafe scripts anyway…trust me
That should bring up the Gateway…
It’s an issue we need to address in our next development contract…which may be a month or so. So please hang in there, keep using the Gateway and be patient with us! Thank you!
Social Media
The facebook and Twitter icons at the bottom of Gateway pages link directly to our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/informationgateway/ and twitter account https://twitter.com/NYGateway You can stay up to date on facebook and/or by following our twitter feed. Please like us and share us on fb and retweet!
The Gateway does have an About page so if you’re new to this emails or need a refresher please follow this About link. You can also learn about the Office of Planning and Development (OPD) on the same About page.
As always, please don’t hesitate to provide feedback on your visit to the Gateway so that we may continue to improve on its usefulness and your experience.
Gateway Team
Division of Community Resilience and Regional Programs
Office of Planning & Development
New York Department of State
1 Commerce Plaza, 99 Washington Ave., Albany, NY 12231 – 0001
O: (518) 486–7942 | C: (518) 810–9710 | jeff.herter@dos.ny.gov |