International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission)
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Governance of national spatial data infrastructures in Europe
Get PDFThe effective development and implementation of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) requires governance in order to avoid gaps, duplications, contradictions and missed opportunities in the implementation of different SDI components. Appropriate governance instruments should be established to coordinate the activities and contributions of different stakeholders. This article reviews the governance of national SDIs in Europe before, during and after the adoption of the European INSPIRE Directive, which aimed to establish an infrastructure for spatial information in the European community. The analysis is based on a governance instruments approach as introduced by public administration researchers to analyse coordination and governance in the public sector. The study shows that the instruments-based approach is a useful tool for analysing governance in the context of SDIs and contributes to a better understanding of SDI governance. Evidence was found for the adoption and use of each of six sets of governance instruments in the governance of national SDIs in Europe: collective decision-making structures, strategic management, allocation of tasks and responsibilities, creation of markets, inter-organizational culture and knowledge management, and regulation and formalization of the infrastructure
CITI-SENSE Citizens’ Observatories Architecture
Get PDFThis paper introduces the architecture of the CITI-SENSE Citizens’ Observatories based on the ISO 19119 reference model. It describes the various parts of the architecture including boundary services with sensors and apps and data management services with the CITI-SENSE data model. It also describes the Web Feature Service (WFS) storage support and the reusable visualisation widgets used for both apps and web portals in various Citizens’ Observatories
Relaunching the Kenya National Spatial Data Infrastructure
Get PDFDespite a history of more than 15 years, the Kenya National Spatial Data Infrastructure had largely stagnated in 2016. The national geoportal, often regarded as the face of a Spatial Data Infrastructure, was not even accessible. Unlike most studies that concentrate on the status of Spatial Data Infrastructures, this study proposes a framework and roadmap for relaunching the Kenyan initiative. It reviews the history, status, and achievements of the Kenya National Spatial Data Infrastructure and then presents an elaboration of the gaps and areas for improvement. Lastly, the study proposes a roadmap for relaunching the initiative that takes into account the institutional and technical framework, the role of coordination, a plan, and its budget. Due to its weak status, the study recommends that Kenya should relaunch the initiative by allocating and developing financial and human resources, developing the legal, policy, and technical framework, and seeking political support
A Scalable Application for Automatic Internationalization of ISO19139 Metadata in DRDSI
Get PDFInternationalization is the process of transforming software or digital documents so that they can be accessed automatically in different languages in different countries. In this work, a prototype software application named MT@EC-Wrapper, which internationalizes a corpus of XML documents, transforming them into a multilingual parallel corpus, is implemented within the Danube Reference Data Services and Infrastructure (DRDSI) of the EU’s INSPIRE project. The application integrates document automation technology with the European Commission’s on-line machine translation service MT@EC. This case study achieves the goal of fully automating the transformation process of the DRDSI ISO19139 XML repository into a parallel corpus in the nine official languages of the DRDSI project. The design of this application also addresses the issues of processing performance, control and scalability. The project is compared with similar systems used within the EU institutions; the focus of the analysis is on metadata standards for internationalization and metadata processors
Geospatial Data Sharing Barriers across Organisations and the Possible Solution for Ethiopia
Get PDFGeospatial data sharing across organisations is a well-recognized challenge with multiple facets. Due to the absence of appropriate space for the sharing of and access to geospatial assets, these often remain scattered and locked within various economic sectors of Ethiopia; this means that datasets are not maintained or updated regularly, efforts are duplicated, finding available datasets is difficult and there is no single reliable version of the data. Exploitation of the full socio-economic benefits of using geospatial information is therefore impossible. This paper therefore aims to assess inter-organisational geospatial data-sharing challenges and the possible solutions within Ethiopia. A lack of coordination between organisations, poor data quality and compatibility, institutional, legal, policy, and technological issues are identified as major challenges. Ethiopian National Spatial Data Infrastructure (ENSDI), which has already been introduced, should be further promoted as the collaborative entity for effective cross-sectoral geospatial data sharing. A national strategy to hand over informal SDI initiatives, building on existing efforts, setting clear (top-down) ENSDI development approaches and collaborative investments in the building blocks of ENSDI are suggested to enable the successful execution of ENSDI as a cross-sectoral geospatial data-sharing mechanism
Development of a New Framework for Distributed Processing of Geospatial Big Data
Get PDFGeospatial technology is still facing a lack of “out of the box” distributed processing solutions which are suitable for the amount and heterogeneity of geodata, and particularly for use cases requiring a rapid response. Moreover, most of the current distributed computing frameworks have important limitations hindering the transparent and flexible control of processing (and/or storage) nodes and control of distribution of data chunks. We investigated the design of distributed processing systems and existing solutions related to Geospatial Big Data. This research area is highly dynamic in terms of new developments and the re-use of existing solutions (that is, the re-use of certain modules to implement further specific developments), with new implementations continuously emerging in areas such as disaster management, environmental monitoring and earth observation. The distributed processing of raster data sets is the focus of this paper, as we believe that the problem of raster data partitioning is far from trivial: a number of tiling and stitching requirements need to be addressed to be able to fulfil the needs of efficient image processing beyond pixel level. We attempt to compare the terms Big Data, Geospatial Big Data and the traditional Geospatial Data in order to clarify the typical differences, to compare them in terms of storage and processing backgrounds for different data representations and to categorize the common processing systems from the aspect of distributed raster processing. This clarification is necessary due to the fact that they behave differently on the processing side, and particular processing solutions need to be developed according to their characteristics. Furthermore, we compare parallel and distributed computing, taking into account the fact that these are used improperly in several cases. We also briefly assess the widely-known MapReduce paradigm in the context of geospatial applications. The second half of the article reports on a new processing framework initiative, currently at the concept and early development stages, which aims to be capable of processing raster, vector and point cloud data in a distributed IT ecosystem. The developed system is modular, has no limitations on programming language environment, and can execute scripts written in any development language (e.g. Python, R or C#)
TOCOMEE: A topological, coloured model of the Earth's elevation
Get PDFThe presented dataset provides free global, topological, coloured elevation data with a resolution of 30 arc seconds, which is available free of charge under the CC BY 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International) licence. It is derived from three well-known scientific datasets and is distributed in tiles covering 5x5 degrees of the Earth's surface. Furthermore, the tiles are available in three levels of resolution. While the data files can easily be imported into common CAD and 3D modelling software, the datasets genuine purpose is to be used as a 3D base map for service-based 3D visualization, especially in the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures
Evaluating the performance of large scale SDIs: two contrasting approaches
Get PDFIn the last couple of years there have been two very different attempts to evaluate the performance of large scale spatial data infrastructures (SDIs). The first of these was in the United States of America where the Coalition of Geospatial Organizations (COGO), a consortium of professional organisations, set up an expert panel to produce a report card of the performance of the US NSDI. The second evaluation was in the European Union where the European Commission carried out its own evaluation of its Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) Directive to meet the requirements of the European Commission. The main features of these two contrasting approaches to evaluation are described in the opening sections of this paper while the final section considers the similarities and differences between the two outcomes of the two exercises. The outcomes of this investigation provide some interesting insights into the issues involved in the implementation of large scale SDIs.
PaleoMaps: SDI for open paleoenvironmental GIS data
Get PDFPaleoenvironmental studies and corresponding data are abundantly published and available in scientific records. However, paleoenvironmental data sets are comparatively rarely provided in GIS data formats. Here, we present an Open Science approach for collecting and creating GIS data, visualizing it in maps of paleoenvironments, and publishing them in a web-based Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), for access by the archaeology and paleoenvironment communities. The Open Science approach to the publication of data allows to properly cite the published data sets as bibliographic sources in research that builds upon these data sets. This paper has its focus on the implementation and setup of the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G)-based SDI, and on the workflow for compiling and publishing the GIS dat
Developing a data-sharing system for geospatial research: A case study on the Joint Research Assist System (JoRAS)
Get PDFThis study demonstrates a framework for joint research at a university research center that supports research in the geospatial information sciences. Here we examine the improvements in an Internet-based spatial data infrastructure and data-sharing system through its long-term operation. In the original system for this framework (the Spatial Data Infrastructure System or SDIS), the purpose was to make accessing spatial data easier for academic researchers. However, after ten years of service, it was still experiencing challenges, such as increased human costs and inconveniences from its operation, which were no longer negligible. In response, the system was rebuilt in 2010 as a new Joint Research Assist System (JoRAS) by reviewing and changing its design to address the challenges. Two years after the establishment of the JoRAS, its effectiveness and the emerging challenges demanded further improvements. This study summarizes the challenges of the former SDIS and the improvements made to transform it into the new JoRAS. The user statistics and its interpretations are then presented. This case study provides a guide to scientists and practitioners who are designing similar systems