Dr. David Oesch
Project Lead
Swiss Federal Geoportal
Federal Office of Topography swisstopo
Switzerland

Biography
David Oesch studied geography and history at University of North Carolina at Greensboro and University of Bern. He completed his masters studies in geography in the meteorology and climatology on remote sensing methods. During his PhD studies initialized operational processing do ingest satellite data for data assimilation process in numerical weather forecast models. For several years he was responsible as service manager at Syngenta for agrarmeteorology and climatology products. Since 2010 he holds the position as a Senior Project Manager for Federal Geodata Data Infrastructure at swisstopo and set up and operates the geo.admin.ch platform.

Abstract
The Swiss Federal Geoportal www.geo.admin.ch

Geo.admin.ch is the implementation and the portal to the federal spatial data infrastructure (FSDI) according to the Federal Act on Geoinformation. Federal spatial data can be accessed over central platform, main features are: Multilingual (five languages), fast and user friendly interface, single point of entry for all spatial data portals of the federal authorities of Switzerland, high performance of information retrieval, even at high loads. This could be achieved by a novel combination of an open source software framework with an innovative cloud computing architecture resulting in an attractive cost / benefit ratio. Furthermore, geo.admin.ch was an early innovator in Switzerland using cloud computing as infrastructure solution for authorities. With an open source and open standards policy, a software framework could be brought to readiness for market within just 3 months of time. Level of public perception and acceptance is a key performance index daily average visitor rate of 10000 unique visitors is the proof of acceptance. With offering an e-mail helpdesk, Q&A section and the use of social media, communications with society is now two ways and near realtime: direct interaction with the groups of interest results in further services and faster realization of public needs. The choice for cloud computing has been proven right: during the media campaign, the number of visitors increased by factor 20 within 2 hours to 30000 unique visitors per day without downtime due to server overload.