International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research (Joint Research Centre of the European Commission)
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Descriptions of Spatial Operations – Recent Approaches and Community Feedback
Get PDFProgress in the technical provision of spatial operations as loosely-coupled interoperable web services requires a corresponding development of standardisation in their description. Operation discovery, usage and interpretation of results require more information on what a spatial operation does than just their input and output interface specifications. Geooperators and WPS profiles have been proposed for addressing operation descriptions for different operational perspectives. Geooperators have been developed mostly for supporting operation discovery through defining alternative perspectives such as a geodata, legacy GIS, formal or technical perspective. These act as filters in the discovery process. WPS profiles provide a hierarchical approach to define the concept underlying an operation and, in more specific profiles, the syntactic interface of the operation. Both approaches require community engagement for reaching an agreed set of documented operations. We report on a discussion of these approaches and the larger framework of a geoprocessing community platform from a workshop held at the AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science in Lisbon in 2015. At the workshop two presentations provided insights in different contexts of use of online geoprocessing. After detailed introductions to the two operation descriptions approaches, two breakout sessions were held. In the breakout sessions operation descriptions and technical developments in the field were discussed. This article summarizes the discussion that took place at the workshop with the intention to involve the extended community in the discourse on operation descriptions
Assessing existing in-situ capacities in EU Member States: an analysis of the Copernicus regulation approach for Hydrography and Transport Network datasets
Get PDFCopernicus is the European Earth Observation and monitoring Programme. It is made out of three components covering the development of services, the space infrastructure and an in-situ component. Between 2010 and 2013 the European Environment Agency coordinated the “GMES In-situ Coordination - GISC” project with the aim of creating a sustainable framework for access to in-situ observation data. The component delivered standards and requirements for the provision of in-situ data access from and for all Copernicus operational services. Focusing on the requirements of the pan-European land monitoring service, we conducted an independent assessment of in-situ (reference) data capacities in 29 European countries. We proposed a framework for consultation and harmonization of metadata sources, having in mind on the one hand INSPIRE, as conceptual reference for the delivery and the discovery of spatial data and services and on the other hand Copernicus services for the requirements on data visualization and access. The consultation of centralized and national-level spatial data infrastructures in particular led to the creation of two informal metadata catalogues, associating products with spatial services for two themes of the INSPIRE Directive (Hydrographic elements and Transport networks). These supported delivery of statistics for a number of data specifications and, in presence of a valid internet address, the testing of view and download services’ endpoints associated with spatial data. This paper describes information sources and a framework for collection of metadata sources. Results are discussed along with challenges and potentials for organizing a decentralized provision of in-situ data from EU Member States as interpretation of the Copernicus Regulation
Observations on an OpenStreetMap mapping party organised as a social event during an open source GIS conference
Get PDFWe discuss an OpenStreetMap (OSM) mapping party organised during the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Europe 2015 conference held in Como, Italy in July 2015. While primarily the mapping party was organised as a conference social event, there was also the serious goal of collecting and adding geographic data to the OSM database of Como city. Our paper describes the organisation, planning and structure of the mapping party. Results show that considerable amounts of data was collected and uploaded to OSM. Overall there was very good interest in the mapping party with 40 participants. While the majority of participants were delegates at the conference and consequently could be considered highly skilled GIS practitioners only a very small number had actually contributed data to OSM in the past. We discuss the key lessons learned and overall positive and negative aspects of this mapping party.
Citizens and institutions as information prosumers. The case study of italian municipalities on Twitter
Get PDFThe aim of this paper is to address changes in public communication following the advent of Internet social networking tools and the emerging web 2.0 technologies which are providing new ways of sharing information and knowledge. In particular public administrations are called upon to reinvent the governance of public affairs and to update the means for interacting with their communities. The paper develops an analysis of the distribution, diffusion and performance of the official profiles on Twitter adopted by the Italian municipalities (comuni) up to November 2013. It aims to identify the patterns of spatial distribution and the drivers of the diffusion of Twitter profiles; the performance of the profiles through an aggregated index, called the Twitter performance index (Twiperindex), which evaluates the profiles’ activity with reference to the gravitational areas of the municipalities in order to enable comparisons of the activity of municipalities with different demographic sizes and functional roles. The results show that only a small portion of innovative municipalities have adopted Twitter to enhance e-participation and e-governance and that the drivers of the diffusion seem to be related either to past experiences and existing conditions (i.e. civic networks, digital infrastructures) developed over time or to strong local community awareness. The better performances are achieved mainly by small and medium-sized municipalities. Of course, the phenomenon is very new and fluid, therefore this analysis should be considered as a first step in ongoing research which aims to grasp the dynamics of these new means of public communication
Mature e-Government based on spatial data - legal implications
Get PDFThe relation of spatial data and e-Government is important, but not always acknowledged in the development and implementation of e-Government. The implementation of the INSPIRE directive pushed this agenda towards a growing awareness of the role of spatial data and the need for a spatial data infrastructure to support e-Government. With technology, policies, data and infrastructure in place, new iterations of this relationship are needed, in order to reach a higher level of maturity. This paper analyses and discusses the need for the differentiated roles of spatial data as an important step towards more mature e-Government. As part of this understanding, the paper focuses on a subset of data, so-called ‘spatio-legal data’. Spatio-legal data are created within the regulated legal environment of public administration, and used for rulings within a given legal area. Sometimes, the legal status of these data is the wording of the law and the spatial data are just visualisation thereof. Under other circumstances, the spatial data themselves represent the legal status. Compliance between spatial data and the legal administrative framework is necessary, to obtain a mature e-Government. A preliminary test of the hypothesis on a small scale, using Denmark as a case study, supports the need for discussion and awareness of the role of spatial data in e-Government with emphasis on the use of spatio-legal data
Confronting Standards and Nomenclature in Spatial Data Infrastructures: A Case Study of Urban Los Angeles County Geospatial Water Management Data
Get PDFThis paper examines the problem of insufficient and often inaccurate water management boundary data in California. Due to fragmented water management in California, no central government agency is responsible for coordinating water data collection, authorship, and dissemination and maintenance. Despite statewide and county scale efforts to build spatial data infrastructures that include water data, the independent and isolated development of geospatial data sustains competing nomenclatures of water management features and poor boundary data in publically available data sets. This paper examines these nomenclature and spatial inconsistencies and calls for assigning standardized numeric identifiers for California’s public and private water management entities. We contend that resolving the development of a universal ID system not only helps reconcile nomenclature differences propagated across data sets but also serves as a vehicle for forwarding an institutionally integrated water management spatial data infrastructure
Load testing of HELIDEM geo-portal: an OGC open standards interoperability example integrating WMS, WFS, WCS and WPS
Get PDFThis paper presents a load testing of the HELIDEM geo-portal, which is an example of interoperability between a number of standard geospatial services as defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium. The portal was developed within the European project HELIDEM (www.helidem.eu) with the aim of valorizing the main project output which is a cross-border digital terrain model. The portal aims at fostering its diffusion and usage trough easily accessible tools. The DTM covers the alpine area located between Southern Switzerland (Canton Ticino) and Northern Italy (Lombardy and Piedmont Regions). From a technological point of view, the server-side component of the portal is based on a Service Oriented Architecture implemented using the open source software ZOO-Project, GRASS GIS and Geoserver; the client-side component is a Web interface based on CSS3 and HTML5 trough the usage of the ExtJS framework and the OpenLayers software. The presented solution is a mix of technologies and software, some of which are considered, within the open source for geospatial community, mature and robust while others are considered promising but not sufficiently tested yet. For this reason this research conducted a load test over concurrent users in order to verify the robustness, quality and performance of the system and to identify eventual bottlenecks. Test results didn’t register any runtime exception confirming the good quality of the implemented system and underlying software. Nevertheless, performance and response time exponentially degrades with increasing number of concurrent users, area of analysis and process complexity. Finally, the test confirms that the implemented solution is robust, in fact no system failure was recorded during the analysis
INSPIRE Empowers Re-Use of Public Sector Information
Get PDFReady access to public sector information offers unprecedented opportunities for the development of new products and applications and to make existing processes more efficient and effective. These developments have perhaps the greatest opportunities in the field of geographic information. Although the Directive on the re-use of public sector information (PSI Directive) was specifically drafted to address the needs of re-users , the Directive establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) is equally important for re-use of public sector information regarding the physical environment. INSPIRE requirements promote that geographic information, concerning 34 spatial reference and various environmental themes, can be found and is physically attainable on the Internet. With the requirement to provide datasets and service metadata, the obligation to conform to INSPIRE data specifications, and the requirement to do this through discovery, view, and download services, INSPIRE makes a significant contribution to the re-usability of public sector information
Spatial Education for Different User Groups as a Prerequisite for Creating a Spatially Enabled Society and Leveraging SDI
Get PDFDuring recent years spatial data infrastructure (SDI) concepts have developed towards user-centered initiatives, whose creation is strongly driven by user requirements. Closely related to (user-centric) SDIs is the vision of spatially enabled societies where access to and use of spatial data is regarded as relevant support for everyone to organize their activities. Both user-centric SDI models and the concept of spatially enabled societies focus on large and diverse user communities encompassing, besides public and private sector organizations, the general public as well. Although the benefits of spatial data use for professional reasons are widely recognized, awareness of the potential advantages for private life such as activities related to citizenship (civic duties and rights) has only recently been raised. Nevertheless, most citizens, as non-professionals regarding spatial data use, face difficulties when carrying out tasks related to the use of resources provided by a SDI. While capacity building is a long-established feature to ensure effective use by professionals, the need for citizens’ spatial education has lately become an important consideration. This asks, on the one hand, for the specification of skills and competencies required on the part of citizens to open up opportunities to benefit from SDIs and on the other hand, suitable education initiatives addressing the general public. Therefore, this paper argues that “Spatial Citizenship” seems to be an appropriate education approach to train user groups as pupils/ students and adults (non-GI professionals), who demand for different education initiatives adjusted to their particular situation
A Cultural Heritage Application Schema: Achieving Interoperability of Cultural Heritage Data in INSPIRE
Get PDFCultural Heritage is a group of resources identified as a reflection of certain val-ues, beliefs, knowledge and tradition by a certain community. These resources are subject to management, preservation and diffusion through legislative and administrative means, which makes cultural heritage fall within the scope of Protected sites, one of the spatial data themes established in Annex I of the INSPIRE Directive. The INSPIRE Data Specification on Protected Sites thus serves as the starting point for modelling cultural heritage information in order to implement, distribute and share it in an interoperable framework based on Spatial Data Infrastructures. Unfortunately, this data specification was primarily conceived for natural protected sites, which makes an extension necessary if it is to be applied to cultural features. This paper proposes an extension composed of three parts: one devoted to administrative information —including legal protection—, another describes the feature itself, and, a third part is dedicated to the inclusion of additional documentation (texts, images, etc.)