International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission)
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Sustainable SDI for EU noise mapping in NRW- best practice for INSPIRE
Get PDFThe Environmental Noise Directive of the European Union 2002/49/EG (END) obligates the EU member states to determine every 5 years the noise emission of major roads and railways, major airports, industrial activity sites and urban agglomerations and to document the results in noise maps. It poses high requirements, as a great number of statewide and ubiquitous geodata and thematic data in the third dimension is necessary (terrain, buildings, roads, railways). To provide these considerable amount of statewide 3D geodata, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) follows a modern implementation concept, the sustainable use and enlargement of the Spatial Data Infrastructure GDI NRW. NRW provides for the first time statewide 3D geodata as features in CityGML via OGC Web Feature Services (3D building models in LOD1, ATKIS 3D road and railway data) and the Digital Terrain Model 10m grid via an OGC Web Coverage Service. CityGML is used as sole common exchange format between web services and noise calculation software to solve syntactic and semantic interoperability problems. A CityGML data base is realised, which contains approx. 10 million buildings.
This article demonstrates the architecture of geodata provision, the 3D modelling in CityGML, the geodata refinement and interoperability tasks as well as the noise calculation results
A Forum for Lively Exchange and Constructive Discussions
Get PDFIntroduction to the Special Issue on GI-Days 2007 by the Guest Editor
The Future of Spatial Data Infrastructures: Capacity-building for the Emergence of Municipal SDIs
Get PDFOur paper suggests a realistic and sustainable pathway that will enable the emergence of comprehensive municipal information infrastructures, which in turn will support higher-level integration for spatial planning and decision-making at the regional, state, national and international scale. First of all, we propose to target our efforts to the primary locus of spatial change, i.e. the municipality, hence we call the strategy the City Knowledge approach (Carrera, 2004). We believe that the creation of sustainable Spatial Data Infrastructures – where data are plentiful and readily available in what we term a “Plan-Ready” scenario – can be achieved by investing time and effort in the creation of comprehensive municipal information systems (Carrera and Hoyt, 2006). The City Knowledge approach is founded on the premise that urban change falls almost entirely under municipal jurisdiction, and specifically under the purview of individual municipal departments. This paper therefore proposes to “grow” this knowledge from the middle-out, integrating a top-down approach to standardization (Craglia and Signoretta, 2000; Nedović-Budić and Pinto, 2000), with a bottom-up approach to neighborhood-scale ‘atomic’ data accrual (Ferreira, 1999; Talen, 1999). We believe that a web-services approach (Singh, 2004) would provide the technical mechanisms whereby towns will be enabled to accrue and maintain their municipal information in an inexpensive, efficient and sustainable manner.
The “middle-out” approach combines the benefits of top-down and bottom-up initiatives, while largely avoiding their respective pitfalls. Thus, instead of proposing a top-down solution to municipal data management, this paper suggests a distributed scheme whereby each department would be in charge of the upkeep of its own urban data, leveraging the power of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as the platform for intra- and inter-departmental sharing of information. The novelty in this approach lies in its pragmatic, yet systematic pursuit of exhaustive, fine-grained, department-level datasets for each physical structure and dynamic activity in the urban realm, and in the identification of the implementation tools available to municipal governments, as well as of the technical and administrative mechanisms for capturing permanent as well as ephemeral change when it is directly or indirectly caused by official municipal acts
Moving the National Soil Database for England and Wales (LandIS) towards INSPIRE Compliance
Get PDFEstablished and developed over the last 30 years, the Land Information System (LandIS) holds significant national soil-environmental datasets collected primarily by the Soil Survey of England and Wales between 1939 and 1987, and latterly by the National Soil Resources Institute (NSRI) at Cranfield University. LandIS data are in widespread use through systems of architecture designed to facilitate access across a range of contemporary applications including: environmental impact assessment; land suitability and evaluation; natural resource inventory; area-based risk and geo-hazard assessments; and characterisation of ecosystem goods and services. For users of LandIS information working on these themes, access to the data is made available through readily-accessible web-based services and applications, dataset provision and fully-functional bespoke applications. The INSPIRE Directive sets out to address the availability, quality, organisation, accessibility, interoperability and sharing of spatial information across a large number of policy and information themes, for all levels of public authority within the Community through the adoption of common standards. Annex III of INSPIRE refers directly to the theme of soil, typified by the information resources held in LandIS. With NSRI a registered soil Spatial Data Infrastructure for England and Wales, this paper examines how LandIS information could be made further compliant with the principles and requirements of INSPIRE
Metadata Model for the European Forest Information and Communication Platform
Get PDFThis paper describes the metadata model conceived for the future European Forest Information and Communication Platform (EFICP). The core of the platform, currently under implementation in the scope of a two-year project funded by the European Commission, is given by a repository of metadata that describes the available information resources. These are distinguished in terms of resource categories (common / bibliographic resources, news, spatial data information services and statistical data) and are treated in a differentiated way by the EFICP metadata model, applying widely accepted standards such as ISO/OGC, Dublin Core, SDMX and RSS, whereas a key requirement for system interoperability is given by the set of INSPIRE implementation rules as currently available. This paper provides a description of the structure of the EFICP metadata model and its components. This model extends the metadata guidelines as proposed by the former NEFIS project. In order to support the online access and exchange of forestry specific statistical data, a general information model for the modelling of these resources in the context of a proposed EFICP reference reporting system has been created and is proposed for implementation on the basis of the SDMX standard.
Keywords: metadata, Dublin Core, OGC, search and discovery, geospatial information services, forestry statistics, EFICS, EFIC
Evaluating the socio-economic impact of Geographic Information: A classification of the literature
Get PDFGeographic information (GI) is increasingly important to citizens, businesses and governments in modern societies. Considerable effort has been devoted to developing our understanding how GI affects the information management strategies and practices of individual organizations (GITA, 2006). However, there is an increasing awareness across public and private organizations that more attention has to be paid to assessing the broader economic and socio-economic impacts of GI technologies (European Commission, 2006; Craglia and Nowak, 2006).
Given the investments that local, regional, national and supra-national organizations have made in GI and may consider for the future, it is imperative that the return on investments in GI be assessed across all scales. This is particularly relevant as GI is viewed increasingly as an infrastructural element for which investments and benefits must be justified and quantified (Grus, 2007). Although an increasing number of researchers are examining different approaches to evaluating specific GI applications, it is clear that the documentation of business cases and assessment strategies for GI investments is still incomplete (GITA, 2006).
The key objective of this paper is to summarize and synthesize some of the current literature related to assessing the value of GI. This review, which was conducted under the auspices of the EcoGeo II project (http://ecogeo.scg.ulaval.ca), is based on an examination of 44 academic, business and government studies. A classification framework was constructed to compare these studies with reference to two key variables: topics and approaches. The studies we analyzed were developed within different public and private organizations and spanned international, national and regional scales. To make the study manageable, we focused particularly on the regional context represented by Canada’s province of Quebec. The results show that the topic of assessing the impacts of GI remains largely embryonic in nature. In particular, we identify the lack of a common vocabulary, no shared understanding concerning exactly which topics should be assessed, a lack of testing for any approaches suggested for evaluation, and often a dearth of concrete answers
An extensible semantic catalogue for geospatial web services
Get PDFSearching for web services is a challenging task due to the diversity of existing discovery tools. Varying standards for service descriptions require different tools to query their content. These standards exist for good reasons. Web services are used in different application environments and special solutions are required for their integration. We suggest an architecture for web service catalogues, which takes this diversity of standards into account. Its extensibility allows for a complete separation between service discovery and service description. Using ontologies for the storage of service descriptions enables the support of different description standards without loosing their specific advantages. The discussion and implementation focuses on geospatial web services. Due to the heterogeneity of spatially referenced data, different specifications exist for them, making the problem of different standards for service discovery and service description most evident here
Providing other people's trails for navigation assistance in physical environments
Get PDFAsking other people the way has always been a widespread social wayfinding technique. In recent years wayfinding in unknown spatial environments has increasingly been supported by electronic navigation assistants. However, the social aspects of wayfinding, such as using other peoples’ experiences, have widely been ignored in the context of electronic navigation systems. In electronic environments such as the WWW the availability of community knowledge - also driven by Web 2.0 paradigms - becomes more and more valuable to users. Other people’s experiences, including recorded browsing paths and activities - so called user trails - are used for recommendation and navigation support and allow users to navigate vast information spaces more easily. In this paper we propose an approach for trail-based navigation in physical environments. An analysis and comparison of the concept of trails in both application areas establishes the basis for a trail model and the implementation of a trail-based navigation system prototype for mobile phones. Practical experiences with a prototype application and potential applications of trail-based navigation assistants are discussed in the context of a tourist scenario in the old town of Salzburg
Developing Feature Types and Related Catalogues for the Marine Community - Lessons from the MOTIIVE project.
Get PDFMOTIIVE (Marine Overlays on Topography for annex II Valuation and Exploitation) is a project funded as a Specific Support Action (SSA) under the European Commission Framework Programme 6 (FP6) Aeronautics and Space Programme. The project started in September 2005 and finished in October 2007. The objective of MOTIIVE was to examine the methodology and cost benefit of using non-proprietary data standards. Specifically it considered the harmonisation requirements between the INSPIRE data component ‘elevation’ (terrestrial, bathymetric and coastal) and INSPIRE marine thematic data for ‘sea regions’, ‘oceanic spatial features’ and ‘coastal zone management areas’. This was examined in context of the requirements for interoperable information systems as required to realise the objectives of GMES for ‘global services’. The work draws particular conclusions on the realisation of Feature Types (ISO 19109) and Feature Type Catalogues (ISO 19110) in this respect. More information on MOTIIVE can be found at www.motiive.net
Next-Generation Digital Earth: A position paper from the Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science
Get PDFThis position paper is the outcome of a joint reflection by a group of international geographic and environmental scientists from government, industry, and academia brought together by the Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science, and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. It argues that the vision of Digital Earth put forward by Vice-President Al Gore 10 years ago needs to be re-evaluated in the light of the many developments in the fields of information technology, data infrastructures, and earth observation that have taken place since. It focuses the vision on the next-generation Digital Earth and identifies priority research areas to support this vision. The paper is offered as input for discussion among different stakeholder communities with the aim to shape research and policy over the next 5-10 years