The Forest Spatial Information Catalog (FSIC) offers accurate and accessible forest related geospatial data to a wide range of stakeholders. The process of describing the resources dates back as far as 1997. More recent developments on cataloguing, particularly meta-database development, began around the first quarter of 2001, following a set of separate global initiatives.

The Forest Spatial Information Catalog architecture includes components for metadata generation (based on the FGDC standard), OpenGIS compliant Web Mapping and client side metadata searching and retrieving.

With the FSIC initiative, CIFOR contributes to the Consortium for Spatial Information (CGIAR-CSI) which is an initiative of the geospatial scientists within the Consultative Group for International Agriculture Research (CGIAR), linking the efforts of CGIAR scientists, national and international partners, and others working to apply and advance Geospatial Science for International Sustainable Agriculture Development, Natural Resource Management, Biodiversity Conservation, and Poverty Alleviation in Developing Countries.

Target audience
The target audience for the Forest Spatial Information Catalog is a diverse set of stakeholders at local, national and international level (government analysts, conservation and development NGOs, producer organizations, researchers) needing forest-related geospatial information for land use planning, forest resource assessment, carbon trading, biodiversity and conservation.

Data
The Forest Information Center supports a wide range of forest-related data sources. The various sources of information together contain thousands of datasets of which some have an extensive amount of relevant attribute data (e.g., more then 10.000 records).

Examples of datasets in the catalog are satellite imagery, aerial photographs, land usage and forest cover, protected area's, research sites, spatial modeling results, agricultural and demographic atlases, roads, rivers and forest boundaries. The metadata information contains information about data quality, spatial reference, entity and attributes, distribution and Intellectual Property Rights.

Property rights
All the data maintained by the system is protected by the regulations of the CGIAR centers as mention on the document “Legal Issues in the Use of Geospatial Data and Tools for Agriculture and Natural Resource Management”. Most of the CGIAR data is regarded as a global public good, which means that its information should be available for everyone. However, in some cases, access to sensitive or otherwise not public data is restricted to authorized users only.

Information System Specifications
The FSIC web service provides online access to the geo-spatial search tool with has direct access to the spatial meta-database. We have chosen to develop the front-end service using Java technology and the Open source STRUTS web application framework created as part of the Jakarta project at Apache. The Java/STRUTS technology enforces the Model2 MVC design pattern.

The back-end of  FSIC uses two databases; a web mapping database and a metadata database. Both are running as web services on the CIFOR domain and have been setup by using ESRI's ArcGIS 9.0 framework (ArcCatalog, ArcSDE and ArcIMS).

Metadata specifications
In order to increase the interoperability of (geo-) information and meta-information, this information management system makes use of the current standards in the field of meta-information. For the implementation of the catalog we decided to go for the FGDC metadata standard (Federal Geographic Data Committee) because it facilitated all the needs we had with regards to the metadata entry fields and it was already implemented by the ESRI product line.