GeoHive – authoritative spatial data at your fingertips

GeoHive (www.geohive.ie) is an initiative by Ordnance Survey Ireland to provide web and mobile-based access to definitive, trusted and maintained spatial data services from many Irish Public Sector Bodies. Launched by Alex White - Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources - on November 3^rd 2015, GeoHive aims to ensure that the State's location data is easy to find, share and use. It is highly compatible with the aims of many Government objectives including the Public Service ICT Strategy and the Public Sector Reform Plan 2014-2016.

GeoHive is underpinned by ArcGIS, a global cloud based platform for the management, visualisation, analysis and dissemination of geospatial content. ArcGIS provides GeoHive with the requisite capability to:

• compile Ireland’s geospatial content into a catalogue
• apply metadata to those content items
• search and retrieve content items
• compile individual webmaps
• provision extensive functionality for sharing and embedding webmaps in web and mobile applications, blogs and social media feeds

These capabilities are realised for web and mobile browsers through a data catalogue, a gallery of webmaps and applications, and the “make a map” application which exposes the functional capabilities of the underlying ArcGIS Platform in a sophisticated responsive application, developed in HTML5 and JavaScript and hosted by OSi on behalf of GeoHive.

Although ArcGIS is a cloud-based platform, the content you can access using GeoHive is not necessarily stored on the cloud. Some data providers store host their data on the ArcGIS Online cloud, however most providers host their data on their own local infrastructure. The GeoHive catalogue is cloud-based but it lists content items that are made readily available as web services by contributors to the GeoHive initiative. The data that you can find on GeoHive has been curated by the GeoHive administrators and represent authoritative sources that you can rely on. These web services are published, hosted and served directly by the contributing organisation.

GeoHive is open and publicly accessible. Web services are provided to a variety of open standards including WMS, GeoServices REST Specification and KML. You are free to use content you find on GeoHive to create, store and share webmaps publicly subject to any terms of use detailed with the content items you wish to use.