14.08.07
INSPIRE-ation: breaking new ground for large scale SDIs
The INSPIRE EU directive is a self-confessed ambitious piece of legislation to create and promote a European-wide spatial data infrastructure (SDI). Existing spatial data should be reused and made available locally and globally via on demand web services. INSPIRE has wide reaching implications for public and private sector organisations alike.
The directive lists SDI target users as “… policy-makers, planners and managers at European, national and local level, and the citizens and their organisations …” In other words INSPIRE affects everyone using services with a location element, including those concerned with education, agriculture, utilities and address points.
The aggregation of local and regional datasets will be a key INSPIRE activity. The initiative endeavours to address the fragmentation of datasets and data sources, gaps in availability, a lack of harmonisation between datasets at different geographical scales and prevent the duplication of information collection. These issues mean that systems can be inefficient or unreliable, and excessive rectification costs can be passed onto the citizen or end customer.
INSPIRE doesn’t just promote efficiency and cost saving; a key motivator behind the legislation is disaster reduction and management. Competent SDI’s will assist with all aspects of disaster management, from initial vulnerability assessments through to the management chain of public alerts, response and recovery. INSPIRE aims to monitor and understand the relationship between human and environmental demands, and promote best practice for dealing with change in both.
In terms of practicalities: consider the many problems of integrating levels of datasets both locally and nationally, even down to language semantics, and how inferior data quality could lead to the magnification of problems inherent within the datasets. Following standard quality management processes, such as those under review by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) data quality working group, will be essential for the successful integration of large scale datasets. The adoption of common, open architectures and standards, for example W3C, OMG, OGC, ISO and WSI will also prove crucial if the INSPIRE goals are to be successfully realised.
The INSPIRE directive came into force on 17th May 2007, but already MOSAIC, the geographic information (GI) strategy for Northern Ireland, is leading the way as one of the first SDI implantations in Europe. The MOSAIC initiative is being processed by the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL) through its agency, Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI), and upon completion will play an important role in the adoption of INSPIRE principles.
The MOSAIC GeoHub, a web-based system with GI technologies and a spatial data storage warehouse, is currently being developed by 1Spatial, Fujitsu and ESRI. GeoHub will act as a central repository for spatial data from both the public and private sector, incorporating elements such as educational, agricultural, statistical and address data with telecoms, water, gas, and electricity data. This data will be managed and maintained centrally, and made available through web services to citizens, public sector and private sector organisations.
The loading of data onto the GeoHub’s Oracle 10g database via FME is 1Spatial's primary development area. Functionality for data validation, layer defining, setting appropriate access rights and setting a default data representation are being developed. Data validation, i.e. ensuring consistent data quality, is an essential feature of MOSAIC; it is counter productive to share the data if it is inaccurate and not fit for purpose. Fujitsu are acting as the GeoHub system integrator, and ESRI Ireland are responsible for developing a web based map viewer and providing the OGC services for data delivery over the web.
GeoHub is being developed using open standards. The sophisticated infrastructure is based on Oracle 10g and OGC compliant technologies for web mapping, web feature serving and web registry (cataloguing) services with emphasis on the management and storage of data. GeoHub will initially go live in November 2007, with the official launch taking place in early 2008.
So what implications does this programme have? MOSAIC is one of only three SDI initiatives currently taking place in Europe and Northern Ireland is the only region within the UK to develop such a GI strategy, meaning that they are already well on their way towards becoming INSPIRE compliant. The project reuses existing spatial data and takes into account the needs of all stakeholders. MOSAIC promotes interoperability between different types and levels of data, and has been developed using open standards. In other words, Northern Ireland’s pioneering MOSAIC programme is providing a benchmark for other regions and countries to aspire to.
Assured data quality and the use of open standards are not only essential for achieving a Europe-wide SDI, but also as fundamental building blocks for international trade and data sharing. As we continue to move towards an information driven world, the standardisation of data quality, quality assurance and semantic registries become evermore important. With the greatest will in the world, sharing data becomes useless if that data is unreliable or unusable. Achieving improved data quality today is the key to tomorrow’s successful data sharing endeavours, for both INSPIRE and beyond.
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