In 2000 forest ministers of Canada’s federal, provincial and territorial governments 
initiated the development of Canada’s National Forest Information System (NFIS 
Canada) to respond to national and international reporting commitments on 
sustainable forest management.  

The development and application of open source geospatial software has allowed NFIS 
Canada to deploy a Canada wide Web-based Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant 
Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI).  A suite of software, documentation, and training 
material has been packaged together (SDI-in-a-Box) to allow for the easy deployment 
of a SDI node. The “SDI-in-a-Box” solution encapsulates all necessary software to 
publish and analyze geospatial and  non-geospatial data over a secured 
infrastructure.

The SDI-in-a-Box meets the all the requirements set out by NFIS Canada.  NFIS Canada 
has adopted several key business models.  These include: NFIS Canada (1) is based on 
international standards, (2) is vendor neutral, (3) is minimize licensing costs, (4) 
is minimize impact on partner business practices and (5) is supporting common 
services delivered over a common interoperable distributed infrastructure.  

SDI-in-a-Box (or NFIS-in-a-Box) is based on a Linux distribution commonly used in 
the informatics sector.  Within the software footprint are Web services key to the 
SDI:  Web Server (Apache), Java Web Container (Tomcat), OGC Web Mapping Server 
(WMS), OGC Web Feature Server (WFS), OGC Web Coverage Server (WCS), GeoLinking Data 
Access Service (GDAS), Distributed Access Control (DACS) and many other services.  
Linux Virutal Server (LVS) and other High Availability (HA) software are also used 
to insure the Web resources (SDI-in-a-Box footrpint) are made tolerant and highly 
available over the NFIS Canada SDI.  

SDI-in-a-Box (or NFIS-in-a-Box) has been deployed in 14 jurisdictions and government 
offices.