I am pretty sure i posted something about the UK Location Stratergy in the News section of Go-Geo! a couple of months ago, but i re-discovered this link and thought that it was worth posting again.  UK Location is a UK pan-government initiative to improve the sharing and re-use of public sector location information.  UK Location have created a number of short documents that help set out the what’s and why’s of the UK Location Strategy.   Intended for Data Managers, they provide initial guidance on what you need to do to publish location information into the UK Location Information Infrastructure.

The guides are split into 10 parts:

• Guide 1: UK Location, an introduction
• Guide 2: Organisation and Data Coverage
• Guide 3: What Needs to Happen and When
• Guide 4: Discovery and View Services

The following guides have yet to be published:

• Guide 5:  The UK Implementation of INSPIRE (coming during July 2010)
• Guide 6:  UK Location Resources (coming during July 2010)
• Guide 7:  Download Services
• Guide 8:  Data Sharing
• Guide 9:  Management and Coordination
• Guide 10:  Data Compliance and Theme Coordination

Certainly, all the published guides are worth a read and they are pretty brief making them digestible.  Understanding what direction the UK Location Strategy will take us on is quite important and these documents provide a good starting point.

September 1st, 2010
Filed under: Inspire by Addy Pope
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Long-term preservation for INSPIRE: a metadata framework and geo-portal implementation.
Arif Shaon and Andrew Woolf  (e-Science, Science and Technology Facilities Council)

Andrew Woolf presented.

Long-term Preservation of Spatial Information: Motivation for INSPIRE

•The INSPIRE directive requires global availability and uniform accessibility of heterogeneous environmental datasets across Europe through interoperability.

Interoperability does not always guarantee sustainability over the long-term. A key question to be answered – What happens to the data when a data provider ceases to exist?

•  A phenomenal deluge of spatial data over the last decade

– Triggered by the growing concerns over environmental problems, such as global climate changes.
– Ensuring sustained access to these data is becoming more difficult.

Efficient long-term preservation is required for both current and historical spatial data exposed through INSPIRE.

Main challenges:

Environmental data inherit the preservation challenges inherent to all digital information.

– Existing preservation approaches and standards, such as the OAIS Reference Model should be also applicable to environmental data.

Environmental data adds to these:

– Highly structured and complex data models (“feature types”) that require special knowledge for accurate interpretation.
– Static data being replaced with dynamic web services, such as the OGC web services.
– Existing preservation approaches would need to be tailored to handle these added complexities.
– The work presented explored the applicability of the OAIS Reference model to the preservation of environmental data.

Notable initiatives:

• ESA announcing the Long Term Digital Preservation (LTDP) initiative for their Earth Observation datasets.
• The National Geospatial Digital Archive (NGDA) project funded under the National Digital Information. Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) – approach specific to US-based data.
• The Geospatial Electronic Records (GER) project: new metadata format introduced is incompatible with ISO 19115 – the metadata format required by European law and INSPIRE for describing European environmental data.
• Some exploratory work by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC).

The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model

• A widely adopted ISO Standard for long-term preservation of digital objects
• Defines an information model that needs to be captured for effective preservation

Preservation Aspects of INSPIRE SDI

What is missing:

• ISO 19115 is not curation aware
• Insufficient Representation Information (RI)
• Data annotation is not captured

What already exists:

• ISO 19115 – Good for resource discovery
• Controlled vocabulary for semantic metadata validation

• Ad-hoc approaches to data management and storage
• Not considered in this project

Preservation profile of ISO

• Extends “MD_ApplicationSchemaInformation” used to create a particular feature view of a source spatial dataset

•  Adds information about the mapping between a source data and its application schema.
•  Adds information about applications/software/services required to effectively apply the mapping.
•  Defines additional data specific RI (e.g. data formats, storage media), mainly in the form of web-accessible resources (e.g. URL).
•  Enables data providers to record RI in other formats than ISO 19115.

A Prototype Preservation-aware Geo-Portal

• Implemented a web-based portal that demonstrates the underlying functions of a preservation-aware SDI

•  Based on GeoNetwork – a widely adopted open source and standards-based catalogue service, also used for the INSPIRE GeoPortal.

Key features:

• Recording, editing, searching and viewing metadata in the Preservation profile of ISO 19115
• Versioning of metadata
• Annotation of both data and metadata through an intuitive and user friendly wizard; captures annotation context in Xpath for metadata records

A Prototype Preservation-aware Geo-Portal (Annotation Wizard)

1) Dataset overview
2) Added annotations
3) X-path based annotation context

Conclusions and future directions:

• Long-term preservation of both current and historical environmental data exposed through INSPIRE is highly important for monitoring and analysing climate change.

•  Awareness is growing in Europe with the emergence of ESA LTDP, albeit not addressed in the current INSPIRE directive.
•  The work presented investigates the requirements for a preservation-aware SDI for INSPIRE and presents a preservation profile of ISO 19115 that outlines the metadata requirements.
•  Future work would need to focus on the implementation of efficient and interoperable data preservation solutions for the INSPIRE data repositories.

Good presentation and an important reality to address now.  How many will wait until it’s too late, then we’ll be left with countless dataset orphans.

As part of Go-Geo! project in 2006, we conducted spatial data audits at four UK universities and the results yielded almost 600 dataset titles and hundreds more orphan datasets- those without provenance, but could be identified from file extentions as spatial datasets (eg: shapefiles, Mid/Mif).

With regards to preservation, who will decide which spatial datasets are worth the resources required for preservation?  Without metadata for these 600 datasets from the audit, how do we know which ones should be reused and retained?

Adding Metadata to Maps and Styled Layers to Improve Maps Efficiency.
Benedicte Bucher, Sebastien Mustiere, Laurence Jolivet and Jeremy Renard

A presentation from the Institut Geographique National (IGN).

Overlaying map layers sharing similar colours can make maps illegible- difficult to interpret.

Not enough colours to represent these features.

Need to formulate objective rules about map design: constraints related to legibility, properties of graphical variables and some conventions.

Facilitating overlays:

Summing the meaning and checking if combined styled fit to the meaning.

Metadata to describe layers meaning (= the information content and how it should be conveyed (reading order))

Meaning…………………………………………………………………………..……………Graphical signs

( Main theme, Scale,           Feature representation    Layer representation              Styles

Geographic entities)

•  Relationships between styles and meaning (e.g. : « same hue means same nature »).

Building a catalogue

Extrapolating European topographic legends to IGN data and qualifying the maps.

• three datasets (diffferent kind of area)
• legend adapted to IGN simplified model
• the main background colour remained the same (as in the country the legend comes from).

• Other topographic legends have been designed based on colour schemes extracted from a colour harmony book.
• Keywords attached to the colour schemes in the book.

Examples provided:

Professional, neutral, serious (dark green dominant on map)

Royal, strong, brave, authoritative, noble, far east (light green dominant on map)

Enthusiastic, young, energetic, innovative (pink dominant on map)

Other topographic legends have been designed based on … colour schemes and grammar rules extracted from French artists’ masterpieces.

Examples showing mood colours on maps provided.

Conclusions:

Facilitating overlay layers to necessitate clarity with expected themes, reading orders, relationships between themes, etc of the resulting map.

Change colours (or change predefined layers) to maintain legibility and avoid any misinterpretation of graphical relationship.

The Central Catalogue Service in Germany
Juergen Walther

Presentation from the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy.

A centralised catalogue service interoperable with 16 federal states running 12 discovery services; also two thematic network services.

Creating an abstract test suite for OGC CSW 2.0.2 AP ISO 1.0.

Test-Software: TEAM Engine (Test, Evaluation and Measurement Engine)

Documentation:

1. Document: Abstract Test Suite for OGC CSW 2.0.2 AP ISO 1.0
2. Document: CTL-scipts (CTL=Compliance-Test-Language)
3. Document: sample metadata (XML-files ISO 19139)

http://www.gdi-de.org/de_neu/test/navl_test.html

Conformance Test for AP ISO 1.0 (Level 1: Discovery) is based on the OGC Team Engine. More than three Catalogues are compliant (one Open Source) so that the Test can be placed as official OGC test.

Advantages:

• one access point
• quick, high quality, cost efficient
• approved OGC compliance
• IR network services compliant
• test with INSPIRE portal
• single point of maintenance

Summary:

• system for interdisciplinary collection, consolidation, contribution and search of metadata.
• metadata from distributed catalogues of municipality, state and country level
• central German metadata node for INSPIRE and German SDI
• indexing of the metadata for a quick search
• storage of the complete, original xml-files
• ranking is realised for the simple search
• double datasets are deleted

Result: a consolidated, efficient and high performance data access for INSPIRE, GEOSS and the German SDI.

Comparative Quality Assessment of Metadata. Two Regional SDI case studies. (IDEC & IDE-CLM).
Paula Díaz, Joan Masó and Jordi Guimet
Presentation from the Department of Geography at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.

Aim of the study:

• Detect and analyse errors in the metadata sets
• Determine the nature of these errors
• Determine their percentage of presence
• Make recommendations for avoiding them

THE IDEC (Catalonia)

• Created in 2002
• The Metadata catalogue.
• The program MetaD: Creation and edition of metadata sets.

IDE-CLM (Castilla la Mancha)

• Created in 2006. Under the INSPIRE Directive.

The standardisation facilitates the:

• Interoperability
• Comparison

This study is based on three standards:

• ISO 19115: to establish the elements as a basis for study
• ISO 19139: to understand the XML documents
• OGC-CSW: to download XML metadata documents
• At time of this study only IDEC and IDE-CLM had OGC catalogues

Creation of a metadata database

• Metadata Sets in XML
• Database containing all the metadata sets
• Extraction of all the mandatory elements and also other optional elements

Database:

• Columns: Mandatory and optional elements.
• Rows: XML files identified by their UUID.

The IDEC:

• 35 columns and 14,616 rows.

The IDE-CLM:

• 35 columns and 98 rows.

All the elements extracted are mandatory by the INSPIRE directive regarding metadata.

Quality Analysis of metadata sets

40,000 metadata records.

Errors in the metadata sets of autonomic catalogues.

• Lack of compliance with the ISO 19115 requirements.

Some examples of mandatory elements:

Reasons for the presence of errors in the metadata.

Three main reasons:

• Lack of accurate information by the metadata creator (such as the date of creation of the dataset)
• The difficulty of determining the information required (the scale information in tabular information with x,y positions)
• Ignorance of certain factors (e.g. processes)

• Methods for creating metadata are not exempt of the generation of errors.
• There is a high percentage of error in the manual compilation of metadata elements.

Recommendations:

• The most immediate recommendation is correct the lacks of mandatory elements.
• The SDI can inform the metadata providers to facilitate them solve errors.
• We recommend establishing common rules for generic creation of metadata titles.
• Use a thesaurus for the selection of keywords.

Conclusions:

It’s possible to carry out a systematic review of the metadata sets of SDI in order to:

• Detect errors, weaknesses, or lacks of good practices.
• Determine the organisms responsible of a specific problem.
• Periodic quality checks of the metadata can be made to detect errors or lacks.
• INSPIRE is more demanding than ISO 19115 respect to the completeness of the metadata.
• This analysis of metadata manifests the presence of different kinds of errors in the metadata sets.
• Much metadata sets have errors that can’t be involuntarily made from common metadata tools.
• There is a lower quality of description in the optional elements.
• There is a need to implement more quality control procedures.
• The average error for all metadata sets is around 3.84% in the IDEC and 11.73% in the IDE-CLM.
• This analysis applied to regional SDI, shows that quality is a compromise between agility for providers who create metadata and the needs of the end-user who wants as much detailed information as possible.

July 30th, 2010
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Last presentation of the Wednesday Plenary Session.

Technical developments: Data Specifications, Network Services and INSPIRE Geoportal.
Paul Smits, Joint Research Centre (JRC)

Roadmap

Data Specifications:

Approved by INSPIRE Committee–Draft COMMISSION REGULATION implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards interoperability of spatial data sets and services (14/12/2009)

–Commission Regulation amending Regulation (EU)  No …/2010 …as regards interoperability of spatial data sets and services (code lists, 17/06/2010)

Approach Annex II and III from the experience with Annex I:

Remain open, participatory, transparent at all steps – coherent and consistent with Annex I.

Reflect the challenges of Annex II and III:

• Number of themes, their inter-relations and dependencies
• many thematic communities not always aware of spatial data infrastructure
• short time available for development

Preparing for Annex II and III Themes:

• Terms of Reference for INSPIRE Data Specification development for Themes of Annex II & III

•  Call for expression of interest for the stakeholders to participate at development of INSPIRE data specification for themes of Annex II and III

–Domain experts, Facilitators and Editors
–Reference materials: currently 125 entries

•  User requirement survey: currently 596 entries
•  Submission of user requirements and reference materials remains open: only items that arrived before 31/05/2010 are taken by TWGs, unless justified relevance

Results from Call (Expression of Interest):

• 320 experts proposed by 53 Legal Mandated Organisations (LMO) and 51 Spatial Data Interest Community (SDICs)

• 23 countries, including Australia, China and Turkey but not Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal
• 19 Thematic Working Groups, some addressing more themes
• 30 Facilitators and Editors in-kind contribution and around 180 domain experts at present
• Most selected experts are supported by LMOs (even when proposed as well by SDIC)

Reference to Theme Grouping where themes from one group would fit in with another.

eg: Geology and Mineral Resources (Annex III) with Annex II.

Network Services:

Legal act already published

- Commission Regulation(EC) No 976/2009 of 19 October 2009 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards the Network Services (discovery and view).

Approved by the INSPIRE Committee

- Draft COMMISSION REGULATION amending Regulation (EC) No 976/2009 as regards download services and transformation services.

Invoke Services:

- Technical Report on the state of play for service invocation.
- Network Service Drafting Team will start activity on this service
- As more and more geo-processing services become available, the issues of how to chain them is increasingly important to move from a data-centric to an information-centric SDI, able to respond to much wider user base.
- Several important research issues to address including better documentation of services, quality and trust, dependencies, rights management, etc.

Geoportal Prototype Development:

Focus on INSPIRE Discovery & View services, metadata

– Tools (Discovery, View, Metadata Editor, Metadata Validation, …)

Updated prototype geoportal available

– Frequent updates since then addressing comments from the community
– According to the metadata, discovery and view services technical guidance documents

Discovery & View web clients based on open source S/W and internal development

– to be released under the Open Source EUPL license and shared with the Member States

Future Geoportal developments:

• Perform interoperability tests in the context of the Initial Operating Capability (IOC)

• Start new work items on download and transformation services
• Release as open source the discovery and view client source code
• Draft specifications for the operational geoportal

July 23rd, 2010
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Towards Implementation of INSPIRE.
Daniele Rizzi, EUROSTAT

Legislation in the adoption process:

• 5th INSPIRE committee meeting, 14 December 2009

- Draft Commission Regulation implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards

interoperability of spatial data sets and services (Annex I)

- Draft Commission Regulation amending Regulation (EC) No 976/2009 as regards download and transformation services

• 6th INSPIRE committee meeting, 17 June 2010

-          Draft Commission Regulation on codelists

• Most if not all MSs have legislation on INSPIRE at different stages in the adoption process
• Some MSs need also the adoption of regional legislation
• National Execution Measures formally notified to the Commission

Full or partial implementation:

Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and UK.

Release of Guidelines and Good Practice documents for supporting Data and Service Sharing.

Monitoring Datasets activities – first results (2009):

Total datasets for the following annex themes:

Annex I: 2,653
Annex II: 1,123
Annex III: 2.354
Total: 6,130

Reporting requirements:

Report: qualitative

• Coordination & quality assurance
• Contribution to the functioning and coordination of the infrastructure
• Use of the infrastructure for spatial information
• Data sharing arrangements
• Cost and benefit aspects

19 Countries provided a report covering year 2009 so far

• Different development stages, different models
• Different degrees of detail

Conclusions:

• Legal implementation sometimes delayed, but on its way
• Legal framework “almost” completed
• Crucial role of the non legal framework (guidelines, recommendations)
• Maintenance
• Implementation in Member States steadily progressing (sometimes in advance to the legal implementation)
• Effective cooperation framework, to be maintained
• Active demand for the implementation of an appropriate SDI framework

July 23rd, 2010
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Wednesday Plenary session continued

INSPIRE Evolution of the Environmental Acquis.
Hugo de Groof

EU 6th Environmental Action Programme 2002-2012

Four Priorities

1. Climate Change
2. Nature and Biodiversity
3. Environment and Health
4. Natural resources and waste

Seven Thematic Strategies

1. Clean Air For Europe (CAFE)
2. Soil protection
3. Sustainable use of pesticides
4. Marine environment
5. Waste prevention and recycling
6. Sustainable use of natural resources
7. Urban environment

*Mitigation of natural and man-made hazards leading to disasters with focus on ‘knowledge-based’ policy making and assessment.

Summary of requirements:

• Integrated Assessments
• Policy Effectiveness
• Policy Compliance
• Policy Implementation

Data sources required for integrated assessments and policy effectiveness.

About monitoring economic development against protecting the environment and meeting social goals using these following indicators:

1. Economic development
2. Poverty and social exclusion
3. Ageing society
4. Public Health
5. Climate change and energy
6. Production and consumption patterns
7. Management of natural resources
8. Transport
9. Good governance
10. Global partnership

Environment doesn’t stop at the borders.

• 20% of the EU citizens (110 million) live within 50 km from a border.
• 60 million EU citizens live less than half an hour (25 km) from a border

Flood hazards as an example. 10 million people live in areas liable to extreme flooding, potential damage estimated at 165 billion euros.

Environment and Health

• 20 million Europeans suffer from respiratory problems every day
• 10% of European children suffer from asthma

• Soils Thematic Strategy against erosion and contamination.
• Pesticides Directive (buffer zones near sensitive areas).
• Noise Directive

Issues – Data deficits

• Numerous indicators sets available, mostly aimed at environment or health, except WHO-EHIS

• No shared institutional infrastructure
• Differences in indicator definitions and construction (geographical scale, age groups, diagnosis, time periods)
• Differences in data collection/ reporting systems
• Lack of harmonised data quality control
• Limitations of international reporting mechanisms in providing EH relevant data
• Many different dataholders/reporting obligations

Conclusions:

• Streamlining legal requirements

– Over-arching EU legislation which impacts on the sharing of data and information
– Information content & reporting in legislation related to the environment

• Building more efficient data and information sharing infrastructures
• Ensure availability of ‘fit-for-purpose’ data underpinning environmental information through adequate monitoring

Comment: A number of critical issues to address, but certainly this data deficit is significant. INSPIRE requires metadata creation to be completed at the end of 2010 for Annex I and II theme data, so how far are we from this reality, and does this bring us closer to accessing and using more data?

Lack of harmonisation in terms of data and infrastructure portends potential problems ahead? So much discussion last year and this about data transformation, harmonisation of data and systems and INSPIRE has been a reality since 2001, but with the INSPIRE Directive coming into force recently in May 2007,  so it has set out an ambitious course over just a few years. The first INSPIRE conference was held in 2007, and certainly an important venue to bring ideas together and receive updates about SDI and metadata activities across Europe. It’s very encouraging to see so many in attendance here.

July 22nd, 2010
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Wednesday Plenary session continued

Max Craglia (JRC) reported for the Institute for Environment and Sustainability, Joint Research Center (JRC) – European Commission.

A review of INSPIRE and importance of SDIs.

Summary of investments for the reduced scope of INSPIRE. The total investment per annum over 10 years in millions of euros:

EU level: 1.9 million
National Organisations: 13 million
Regional and Local: 77- 122 million

There is a breakdown in costs for these figures and metadata activities were included.

EU level: 200,000 euros
National Organisations: 1.9-2.2 million euros
Regional and Local: 33 million euros

Comment: This seems like serious money with regional and local authorities assuming the brunt of the costs. UK academia possibly similar to regional and local authorities, but then Go-Geo! services offer free support to academia for metadata creation, so considerable savings compared to these local government bodies which must comply with the INSPIRE Directive, which was transposed into law here at the end of 2009 and requires UK academic institutions to create metadata for spatial datasets which fall under one of the annex data themes. Most spatial data created within UK academia probably falls under INSPIRE Annex III theme.  Metadata for these spatial datasets are required for the end of 2013.

Benefits to these costs:

Comment: How can these be quantified with regards to academia? Certainly difficult, but there are cost and time savings if spatial datasets are shared, or metadata used to protect these as part of good data management.

Examples:

Removing these costs would save over 100-200 million euros per annum.

Comment: No one seems convinced that this is the case. We see people running out to buy the latest gadgets, but not very many engaging in good data sharing and management practices. Below is an example Max Craglia provided from England and Wales. It would seem that with current austerity measures, more funding would make sense for long term savings?

Environmental monitoring and assessment

• Cost of monitoring the environment in England and Wales was approximately 160 million euros per annum.
• Most EU countries undertake similar functions although the organisational arrangements are different (centralised federated, decentralised).
• The approximate cost across EU (15) was estimated as 1 billion euros.
• Estimates of greater efficiency from well organised metadata, harmonised data, and improved data management can add up to 10% of total cost.

Extrapolating across the EU 15 countries = 100 million euros per annum.

Assumed INSPIRE benefits (after revisions): 770 to 1,150 million euros per annum.

Benefits due to more effective and efficient services:

Example of Catalonia

Costs: 1.5 million euros over 4 years

(2002-06)

Benefits: assessed for 2006 with a focus on local government level

• Efficiency savings account for 500 hours per month = 2.6 million euros
• Effectiveness savings account for another 480 hours per month

Wider social benefits for Catalonia:

• Facilitating the use, reuse and sharing of resources within an SDI helps to close the digital gap between small and large municipalities.
• Many small municipalities are now able to offer their residents.
• Provides the basis for greater transparency, more informed citizens, and increased participation in the democratic process.

Lombardia Regional SDI: key findings

Costs: 4 million euros for 2006-2008 (including technology set-up and maintenance, training)

Benefits: focus on external users. Repetition of 2002 European survey on EIA/SEA. 350 EIAs/SEA per annum in Lombardia, a market of around€25 million per annum

Average saving due to SDI: 11% time, and 17% on cost

Benefits: 3  million euros year savings a year on EIA/SEA only.

Equally important is that sharing the same information base among developers and regulators facilitates dialogue, and results in better assessment of impacts and shared understanding of the issues, i.e. better management of the environment.

Comment: Catalonia and Lombardia seem to demonstrate that there can be benefits in the use of SDIs, which of course metadata plays a critical role.

Then some reflections on new innovations:

• New trends in Information Society = new opportunities e.g. Social Networking, e-mail usage
• Mobile Internet Desk Top Internet Adoption

- increasingly Mobile Phone is used for data and now accounts for more than voice calls.

- Mobile + geography = innovation and new services

Amazon example

Globo Amazonia launched by TV Globo in Brazil in 2008

• Interactive site with satellite data provided by INPE to report illegal logging and clearing fires.

•  Expected impact 1 million users in first year.

• 41 million reports in 3 months
• Reports followed up by journalists of TV Globo
• Large social and political impact

Comment: Quite amazing that this Globo Amazonia received 41 million reports to report illegal logging and clearing fires in just 3 months. It seems we need to consider how to engage the public? Flickr and Youtube have demonstrated the potential which exists for engaging the public to provide information, so could the same be considered for spatial data, and what level of metadata would we expect as Flickr and Youtube submissions offer some discovery level metadata (place and subject keywords, title and the occasional comment which serves as an abstract/description).  Obviously, this is more fun than just sitting and writing metadata, and photos and film are the media for personal expression and sharing experiences with a familiar group or for the general public. There are awards and accolades presented to those providing exceptional photos on Flickr.

Max Craglia’s conclusions:

Spatial data infrastructures like INSPIRE are not just a technological artefact but a social process both in their development, and their implementation e.g. in changing business processes in the public administration.

July 21st, 2010
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Word is out, but then it seems it has been since the past couple of months that INSPIRE 2011 will be in Scotland. If I understand correctly, tradition has it that the venue for the conference cannot be in a country’s capital city, but in this case it might be Edinburgh? Aberdeen was mentioned, but not as easy to reach as Edinburgh for most those travelling from the EU;  no mention of Glasgow, but then I just heard about it now, so could be there as well next year?

The conference started on Wednesday with the plenary session and noticed quite a few people in attendance.  I believe it was Hugo de Groof, the EC Directorate-General for the Environment who commented that there were 600+ attending the INSPIRE Conference.

Plenary Session

Europe Inspired.
Jacqueline McGlade, Executive Director, European Environment Agency (EEA)

Eionet = A network of more than 2000 experts from 37 countries in more than 800

national organisations, consisting of:

• European Environment Agency
• National Focal Points
• National Reference Centres
• European Topic Centres

Putting in place a sustained, quality assured environmental monitoring and observing capacity to inform 870 million people in 57 countries about the state of the environment.

Monitoring outputs

• Priorities not always clear; often too much disconnected information;
• Customised components: not always standardised.

Shared Environment Information System core principles

• Provide once but using for many purposes

• Quality assured
• Traceable i.e responsible person/institution identified
• Managed as close as possible to source
• Accessible to enable clients to make comparisons at the appropriate geographical scale (cities, countries, river basins, catchment areas)
• Available to the public after due consideration of the appropriate level of aggregation

*At least 80% of all environmental data and information used by EEA has a spatial dimension.

Global Monitoring the Environment and Security (GMES)

GISC – EEA- ESA- ESRIN

Sentinel 1 – SAR imaging: All weather, day/night applications, interferometry
Sentinel 2 – Multispectral imaging
Land applications: urban, forest, agriculture, etc. Continuity of Landsat, SPOT data
Sentinel 3 – Ocean and global land monitoring: Wide-swath ocean colour, vegetation, sea/land surface temperature, altimetry
Sentinel 4 – Geostationary atmospheric: Atmospheric composition monitoring, trans-boundary pollution
Sentinel 5 – Low-orbit atmospheric: Atmospheric composition monitoring

GMES Architecture:

1) Observation infrastructure (Space infrastructure) (in Situ infrastructure) (GMES services)
2) GMES services (Land, Marine, Emergency, Atmosphere, Security) (Users)
3) Downstream sector (Value multipliers) (Downstream services) (Users)

She noted the importance and relevance of INSPIRE data to GMES – many of the Annex I, II and III data themes for most GMES services, or land, marine and atmospheric services.

Integrating information from local to global level

• Farmers integrating space and in-situ monitoring
• Integrated monitoring: New Nervous system for the North
• Integrating space and in-situ observations: Sensor Web
• Biodiversity Information System for Europe (BISE) Topics: Protected Areas

Globcover Portal: global composite and land cover maps using as input observations from the 300m MERIS sensor on board the ENVISAT satellite mission.

She also identified some of today’s challenges

• Infrastructure costs are fixed and ongoing, and distract from the mission of reducing business process friction and problems.
• Leveraging past investments to provide future value.
• Many data centres at limit—real estate, capacity, cooling and power.
• Matching capacity to demand.
• Maintaining security while increasing access and transparency—within and outside the organization.
• Security, access, and transparency across the value chain: suppliers, partners, etc.
• Lack of a common platform.

Dr. McGlade summarised the importance of Cloud with a diagramme and suggested a 60% reduction in costs and more data security using Cloud .

Cloud

Enterprise

Cloud Platforms today

Private Could Platforms

Public Cloud Platforms

-          Hosting Partners: VMware vSphere (ESX, vCenter)
-          Housing Partners: Microsoft (Hyper-V, System Center)

• Platform as a Service (PaaS) )for Scalable Web Applications: Google AppEngine, Windows Azure Platform
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Data-driven Business Applications: Salesforce.com, Force.com

A survey where 42% of EU citizens feel poorly informed about environmental issues.

Eye On Earth platform – objective

• Provide a user-friendly global platform for dissemination of environmental and related data and information containing:

• Quality assured data, observed and modelled, voluntary and/or mandatory
• User observations and feedback
• Showcases (Multimedia)
• Visibility to citizen’s and community actions To serve a wide variety of communities and individuals at different levels of complexity

GIS Technology is Changing

• Easy, Accessible and Collaborative

Enabled By

• Cloud Architecture
• Web Services
• Mashups
• Crowd Sourcing

• Open Data Sharing Policies

Expanding to mobile GIS: Connecting Mobile Workers

• Capture Photos
• Smart Phones
• Customisable Applications
• Tablet

Other portals which might be of interest to you which Dr. McGlade introduced at the Plenary session.

GMES Land Monitoring Portal

ESRI GEO Portal

Rich Spatial Flex Viewer EEA landcover maps with Flickr photos.

European Urban Atlas

Youtube for Maps and other Map applications

SensorWeb

Quite a few interesting portals and spatial data resources on the web and Cloud becoming prevalent and solution? We need the data for all this to happen.

July 21st, 2010
Filed under: Conference by amathys
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The INSPIRE Conference started with workshops on Tuesday (22 June); the conference summarised under a separate blog. In general, these were organised as four presentation for each session with six sessions for the day. Really not workshops, but decided to attend the following:

• GIS4EU, a Cooperative Project to Apply the INSPIRE Directive
• European SDI Best Practices in Dialogue
• Data Quality and Metadata for Evaluation and Use within INSPIRE (two sessions)

The GIS4EU sponsored workshop provided a summary of activities to date with the announcement of the project ending soon.  Multiple partners, with Intergraph playing a key role, the aim has been to develop a common data model which European local, regional and national mapping agencies can use to implement and deliver cross border accessible and interoperable base cartographic datasets for aggregation.  The INSPIRE Directive Annex I data themes (administrative units, hydrography, transportation networks and elevation) were targeted.

The presentations delivered during this workshop session described the methodology and the results of GIS4EU process impact analysis, which provided a review of the operational implementation steps developed for European SDIs to implement the INSPIRE Directive. This analysis used 50 datasets coming from 10 local/regional/national data providers distributed in five different European countries.

COMMENT: Are these issues for spatial data deposited on ShareGeo and displayed on Go-Geo! using WMS? The main theme of many of the papers presented is about the harmonisation of data (eg: scale, format).

The eSDI-NET hosted the  ‘European SDI Best Practices in Dialogue’ workshop. Presentations were from several finalists for the eSDI-NET award.

Alan Moore from Forth Valley GIS presented as one of the nominated organisations. His emphasis was on approaching organisations and institutions first before doing the technical implementation.  Engaging the users was critical and the reason for success of Forth Valley GIS.

The Iderioja Project presentation provided an overview of the Spatial Data Infrastructure successes achieved for the Government of La Rioja (Spain).

X-Border SDI presentation covered collaborative SDI developed between North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany and the Netherlands. The aim of the programme is to develop and implement a structure for the supply of cross-border geographic information.

COMMENT: These presentations demonstrated that there can be collaborations in terms of data management and sharing delivered through portal services, but it is important to approach users first to understand their demands before any implementation takes place. We should never assume that we understand what they want without approaching the users first. The last presentation also showed how there can be cooperation at the organisational level as well, which would be good to achieve with UK academia at the institutional and departmental levels.

The Data Quality and Metadata workshop was intended to be invitation only for those involved with this project to receive feedback from EU countries about the importance of the use of metadata to describe the quality of spatial data for the purpose of fitness. Basically, there was a to be a delegate from each of the 27 EU countries. The task for him/her was to disseminate a position paper/questionnaire  to key people in each country, then report reactions/responses at this workshop; however, of the 27 countries, there were only 15 people at the workshop, some of whom the original contact delegate must have appointed to represent him/her.

I won’t go over the details of each report, but then the following countries were represented, but had not disseminated the position paper yet, or were planning to do so later:  Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Norway, The Netherlands and Slovenia.  The UK (Environment Agency), Sweden, Spain, Poland, Belgium and Czech Republic did provide feedback, but then a one or two from a personal perspective rather than feedback. Actually, the UK had the most respondents with 9 reporting back to the Environment Agency.

In summary, without the details of the questions posed, quite a few didn’t understand, and found problematic, the conformity elements. The Belgian (Flemish) delegate suggested the creation of a tool or ’stamp of approval’ to address conformity; the Czech Republic delegate suggested that INSPIRE provide some sort of  certification to simplify; both seem like excellent ideas considering that almost a majority of those who commented, had issues with understanding conformity, though there seemed to be general agreement of the need for it.

Regarding other DQ elements, most noted the importance or relevance of lineage, many thought it would be useful to have case studies to provide greater clarification of the DQ elements to users. Data transformation was covered in this position paper, but almost no one had any comments to make with regards to this other than keeping it simple- ‘first iteration, description only’ was one comment.

Spatial accuracy wasn’t really noted other than one from Swedish delegate who noted that their data was very accurate, so didn’t need to be addressed.

Another question in this position paper pertained to the support of additional DQ metadata elements, but most delegates did not believe this should be the case; French delegate believed so, and Slovenian, Spanish and Belgian delegates noted that their profiles already had some of the DQ elements.

The discussions that ensued reinforced the notion that ‘more’ isn’t better, and should be left to individual countries. Someone from the OS suggested that only title and contact details necessary for metadata- at least quoting Mike Goodchild, but then I talked to him at GISRUK and he said metadata was important, and though he would suggest that less is better, he said it was important to describe how a spatial dataset was used, along with contact details, title, description and the other core elements.

This is a separate matter, but point is that there seemed to be an aversion to having more metadata, especially the DQ metadata, but would this mean making it mandatory within existing INSPIRE guidelines or optional? It would seem that making these optional would be the best road to take, but then there were the comments of leaving this to each country to decide, but I’m guessing that no one would object if these were included as long as they were not mandatory elements, which is the case for UK AGMAP 2. Granted, the lineage element is already mandatory, so uncertain why this question was included in the position paper?

There was support for INSPIRE setting the framework for DQ and conformance if DQ were to become a reality, but conformance is already an issue with some confusion about it and how to address it?

Antti Jakobsson, from Eurogeographics, and involved with ESDIN Data Quality project, suggested to organisers that the ESDIN work could be reviewed and considered for DQ. He noted that the ESDIN working group were finding some errors in this DQ for INSPIRE metadata project.

Is it necessary to have these two separate DQ projects? Perhaps the ESDIN DQ project’s results will suffice and serve the INSPIRE community, but again, assuming none of the elements is mandatory.

There should also be discussions about creating quality statement support for services? Downtime and service performance are important and critical to know in the event of accessing data during emergency response mapping. I’m not sure if ISO 19119 supports this sort of detail, but it was mentioned time and time again about how many people live so close to borders and how so many are vulnerable to natural disasters such as floods, so it seems that cross-border responses are very dependent on services in adjacent countries and local authorities, so something to explore.

In the meantime, the focus is on providing support for data quality statements.

This was the it for the INSPIRE workshop programme on Tuesday. There were a couple of other interesting sessions in the afternoon, but with this ESDIN DQ project, this last one seemed more relevant to attend? There was one on  ‘Implementing Rules for the INSPIRE spatial data services‘, but it was invitation only as well, but as mentioned, the delegate turnout was so low that the rest of us were allowed to stay and participate after presentations had been completed.

July 16th, 2010
Filed under: Conference by amathys
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Last week saw the second OSGIS event held in the UK. OSGIS is a conference on Open Source GIS software and is hosted by The University of Nottingham. The 2009 event was a huge success but the organisers decided to tweak the conference format for 2010 in response to feedback from delegates.  So, this year the conference spanned 2 days with the first day being devoted to workshops and the second being formal presentations.  Initial feed back seemed positive and the delagates i spoke to found the workshops particularly useful. The workshops that were run are listed below, unfortunetly i was not able to attend the workshop day.

• gvSIG Desktop & Mobile Workshop  – (gvSIG Association,SPAIN)
• Databases and Web Mapping, the Open Source Way – (Jo Cook, Oxford Archeaology North)
• Workflows for Earth Observation Systems (GEOSS, GMES) Workshop – (CGS, University of Nottingham)
• OS OpenSpace Developer evening – (Ordnance Survey, UK)

Day Two saw the focus move from hands on work to formal papers and presentations.  The key not presentation was given by Prof. Ari Jolma of Aalto University, Finland. This outlined the 4 problems of using spatial data;

1. Presentation – maps
2. Interaction – display/keyboard/mouse
3. Modeling – algorithms/spatial analysis
4. Development – software/tools

Ari reminded us all that we should be developing software and tools that enabled users to solve actual problems, rather than just playing around with functionality.  This development or refinement could be in any of the areas outlined above.

Next to take the stage was Steve Ramage, the new Executive Director of the Open Geospatial Consortium.  Steve gave an overview of what the Open Geospatial Consortium was and how it worked alongside the OSGeo foundation. He stressed the importance of open source software and that the current economic climate should be seen as an opportunity to increase the use of open source software in all sectors.  However, the open source opportunity must realise its value and help organisations to measure the value of open source options.  If the bean counters cannot measure the value of something then they are unlikely to invest in it.

Arnulf Christl, current president of the OSGeo foundation, rounded off the first session by bringing everyone up to speed with what was going on in the OSGeo.  This included a potted history, a description of what the foundation stood for and what its future plans were.  One little nugget that i picked up was the firefox plugin, WMS Inspector. WMS Inspector provides a set of tools for integrators and developers that work with the Web Map Service (WMS) standard. Useful and new to me, but i am sure some of you will already know it and use it.

The rest of the day was made up with presentations that focused on both the development of software and its implementation.  The crew from gvSIG gave a couple of presentations, one described the gvSIG Association which is a an initiative where small companies can sign up to the Association in order to form collaborations with other organisations when bidding for or delivering project. This helps small companies bid for larger work and has helped gvSIG become a recognised alternative to proprietary software.

Other presentations that stood out were Tim Waters overview of what was going on with Open Street Map.  OSM has gone from strength to strength over the last year and has emerged as a useful resource in disaster management.  An active contributor community can add features to areas that are poorly mapped, update maps much quicker than larger mapping organisations and map temporary structures such as refugee camps.   Anthony Scott, Cranfield University, gave an interesting overview of how you might use open source software to work with Ordnance Survey Mastermap data.  Anthony used a use-case example of investigating combined heat power at a building level.  He used QGIS and was able to customise widgets to make repeat analysis easier for less proficient users.  However, i am not sure i would class this example as a simple GIS task as it still involved quite a bit of detailed modeling and analysis which would require some GIS know-how.  Also, it would have been great to see how the results compared when OS OpenData was used instead of the quite costly Mastermap data.

The day was rounded off by Tyler Mitchel, OSGeo Executive Director and Jo Cooke, Oxford Archeology/Archaeogeek). Both called for a concerted push to stimulate the OSGeo(UK), the UK chapter of OSGeo.  This would certainly help to make others see the value of Open Source GIS software.  Many organisations have started to move over to OpenOffice, the same shift is possible in GIS and OSGeo(UK) has a major role to play. But, this is dependent on the community in the UK doing something to make it happen.   You can start to get involved by joining the OSGeo mailing lists:

OSGeo Mailing List

OSGeo(UK) Mailing List

I have signed myself up and volunteered my services.  Anyone else?

Overall, the OSGIS event was again a success.  The new format of one day of workshops and one day of lectures worked well and there was a good mix of attendees from the  academic, public and private sectors.  A big thanks to all the team in Nottingham for working so hard to make the day a success, especially Suchith.  I am looking forward to the 2011 event.

June 30th, 2010
Filed under: Conference, OSGeo, Open Source by Addy Pope
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OK, I’ll admitt it.  I am a physical geographer and have had little to do with human geography for many years.  However, when i arrived at EDINA i had to get to grips with a number of datasets that were completely new to me.  That is ok, it is a challenge but data can be interesting.  Part of my role, is to provide help to Digimap and UKBORDERS users.  Most of the data held in Digimap seemed familiar and i quickly got used to the rest.  UKBORDERS was a different story.

UKBORDERS is run from EDINA and is part of the Census.ac.uk service.  It holds digitised boundary data and associated datasets of the UK for use in geographic information systems (GIS).  Census data is confusing but fortunately the Easy Data Downloader tool gives users direct access to a number of popular datasets.  If you need anything else then you will have to extract it from the repository yourself.  At this point you need to understand both the census data terms and the subtleties of the UK’s administrative boundaries. Unitary athorities, Districts, Counties, Lower Super output areas, upper super output areas………then you discover that data is not consistent between Scotland and the rest of the UK .

Well, getting to grips with the data in UKBORDERS has just got easier.  A series of excellent learning objects have been created to get users started.

Module 1

The aim of this module is to help your understanding of the various geographies of the United Kingdom which are commonly encountered when using geo-referenced socioeconomic datasets and how these geographies are represented digitally within digital boundaries and geographic lookup tables.

UKBorders Learing Object

Module 2

The aim of this module is to help you understand how digital boundaries and geographic lookup tables can be obtained through the UKBORDERS service as part of the ESRC Census Programme.

Module 3

The aim of this module is to help you understand how digital boundaries can be used with area based statistics for the purpose of data linkage, data visualisation and analysis in order to answer socioeconomic research questions.

The geography of the UK’s adminastrative borders is at best confusing.  Hopefully the UKBORDERS Learning Objects will prove useful.   Working through them reinforced some of what i thought i knew and cleared up a number of uncertanties.  They are certainly more engaging than reading through page upon page of help documentation.

If you use the learning objects and think they are worthwhile, drop us a line via the Edina helpdesk or leave a comment on this post.  You might even have an idea for a learning object that would be useful to create.

June 16th, 2010
Filed under: Uncategorized by Addy Pope
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