Building geospatial Web portal for use of national agricultural statistics in geographic context

The national agricultural statistics data are being widely used by federal and state government agencies for decision making and universities for academic research. It has great impacts on national economy and homeland security. However, most of these data are stored and published in the form of spreadsheet. Only few of them have been used to create a map for geographic analysis. This paper introduces a fully extensible geospatial Web portal designed to use Web services to integrate the various national agricultural tabular data with relevant geographic data, and make them discoverable, retrievable, analyzable and visualizable in the geographic context over Web. This portal increases the visibility, usability of government tabular data and improves accuracy, promptness and broadness of decision support system.