Forest inventory and analysis information delivery architecture

The forest inventory and analysis program of the forest service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, is developing a new generation of tools based on XML, designed as a service-oriented architecture, and written in Java using established open standards and toolkits. This effort is in response to the opportunity provided by Web services technologies to create an enterprise software development environment of loosely connected applications and services. When based on communication standards rather than specific implementation technologies, these applications and services are capable of a great degree of interoperability and reuse. The U.S. e-government initiative is aligned with this paradigm and calls for an information architecture that is service-oriented, highly interoperable, and standards-based. This document presents the organizational context and technical details of the N-tier, service-oriented architecture being developed to support this effort.