Following in the Footsteps of Humboldt
Annual Conference of Runder Tisch GIS

From 26th to 28th of February 2008 the annual conference of the GIS networking association Runder Tisch GIS e.V. took place at the Munich University of Technology. Around 350 visitors from Switzerland, Austria and Germany gathered in Munich to compare notes about the future paths of the geospatial sector. This year’s focus was on the emerging European Spatial Data Infrastructures and how to make their concepts and ideas alive. This article will present some highlights of the conference.

By Florian Fischer

The Munich University of Technology provided a good infrastructure to talk about Spatial Data Infrastructures.

 

Information Infrastructures Everywhere

“Does there still someone have the general overview on that?” has been the short comment on the first afternoon by Prof. Schilcher, chairman of the networking association Runder Tisch GIS e.V. and head of the GIS department at the Munich University of Technology (TUM). He referred to the general view on the different information infrastructure initiatives that have been presented so far. All on the level of the European Union and all deal with spatial information somehow. Probably the most well known is the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE). And there is the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) which is a European initiative but an information infrastructure as well and shall support agencies in Europe on their repor­ting duties. And then Dr. Markus Erhard from the European Environment Agency presented the European Environment Information and Observation Network (EIONET). And then there are still dozens of national information infra­structures for different sectors and purposes. Therefore Prof. Schilcher’s question met to sympathy in the audience by all means. Eventually the question is whether there are crossroads of these infrastructures or do they exist in totally parallel worlds. In order to approach this question the INSPIRE initiative has been in the center of discussion on the conference.

The Current Status of European Spatial Data Infrastructures

In Geographic Information Science a current topic is the development of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). An SDI basically aims at the provision and usage of spatial information by geographically distributed and decentralised spatial information repositories and spatial processing services. Prof. Lars Bernard from the Technical University of Dresden gave a lecture on the current status of European SDIs and the INSPIRE initiative. So far there have been many initiatives on regional and national SDIs in Europe. Early operational SDI-applications are already implemented but on the European level they mostly the have the character of pilot-projects, test-beds or feasibility studies. Interoperable usage of geoinformation on a European level is limited due to costs and a missing framework for coordination, standards, rules and organisational structures. The INSPIRE Directive became effective in May 2007 and will last until May 2019. The requirements of INSPIRE are put on paper by implementing provisions and are developed at the moment. First predominant requirements for basic services are produced and in 2010 the European SDI is expected to be operational for searching metadata and visualise data. That is a fairly tough time table especially when one takes into consideration that the EU member states and their regional administrations are part of plan of conduction. Additionally the directive still involves some pitfalls on the level of semantic transformation. Proper web-services are still nee­ded for an intelligent solution. Dr. Andreas Donaubauer and Florian Straub (both TUM) presented a quite sophisticated service for semantic translation.

Model-driven Web Feature Service

INSPIRE requires to establish interoperable geo web-services. By the guidelines an establishment an interoperable access to all geo web-services of the EU member states shall be granted on a technical level. On a semantic level that is, on a level interoperability of data-models INSPIRE provides European-wide, harmonised data models for distinctive themes like administrative boundaries. Consequently data providers have to transform their data from their own data models to the EU models. The transformation is supposed to be done by special transformation services. One presented way of doing this is the model-based transformation. Geo-data models are therefore described by a conceptional schema language (CSL). Thereof conceptional data models can be created and afterwards transformed to any necessary transfer format by an appropriate parser. But again a conceptional illustration of a model has to be created to use a model based transformation. Donaubauer and Straub propose a web service for the semantic transformation called mdWFS-ST for “model-driven Web Feature Service – semantic translation”. The service has two operations and is designed to fit into an infrastructure of OGC Web Services. Therefore the mdWFS-ST essentially is a Web Feature Service (WFS) with the capability of semantic transformation on the fly. Thus it ensures semantic interoperability on a web-service level which perfectly fits in the philosophy of INSPIRE. Eventually it is not only a technical gimmick but has really precious functionality. A best practice example is an application in cross-border spatial planning. The planners will be confronted with different notations and the semantics of these notations but the mdWFS-ST could help to resolve these problems.

The Humboldt Project: On the interface between INSPIRE and GMES.

Humboldt

Next to interoperable web services the European Spatial Data Infrastructure will need applications. There are already some pilot-projects and test-beds but all lack of durability. Moreover many of them concentrate on specific technical features. Whereas the approach of the HUMBOLDT project is rather different as it tends to show new paths on the way to INSPIRE. The aim is to achieve progress in SDI by projects that build on a SDI to what a SDI can be used for. The HUMBOLDT projects especially try to integrate GMES here. Therefore the project name has been chosen after Alexander v. Humboldt, a scientist who tried to collect and integrate knowledge about the world and create new insights.

The aim of the HUMBOLDT project is not to create a product and algorithm or an application itself. As a project it aims on initiating a long-term user perspective for data and services of the emerging European SDI. Thus the project is rather a hodge-podge of various activities. It involves an Open Source Framework that is, a collection of free and open-source tools and concepts for the harmonisation of spatial data. Secondly there is the aim to establish a developer community to keep the HUMBOLDT framework going on in the future. Complementary a user community ought to be established to gather people that use the applications basing on HUMBOLDT. The communities frame the development of application scenarios that use the HUMBOLDT framework.

Geospatial is Not Special Anymore

The way to show the utilisation of the emer­ging European Spatial Data Infrastructure by developing real-life application seems to show promise. Even more promising seems the idea of the respective scenario as an initiation only and the commitment to make the applications operative and durable. However even the HUMBOLDT applications still embrace a certain character of a test-bed. This might be inevitably but this issue has to be dealt with care.

All the lively discussions about INSPIRE and the emerging Spatial Data Infrastructures have also shown that SDI is the vehicle to bring geospatial technology to many application areas. The integration of Geospatial Technology into the mainstream IT is an inevitable trend. All the more I wondered that the geospatial community is still addicted that much to application scenarios that focus in pure use of geospatial technology. The combination with mainstream IT opens up for more interesting scenarios and I believe for even better durability. The HUMBOLDT project is line marking this paths a bit and hopefully there will be more projects like this.

Florian Fischer ffischer@geoinformatics.com is contributing editor GIS for GeoInformatics. For more information, have a look at: The HUMBOLDT project: www.esdi-humboldt.eu Runder Tisch GIS e.V.: www.rtg.bv.tum.de