INSPIRE services in NMCAs

INSPIRE Conference – Firenze - June2013

dominique.laurent@ign.fr Thomas.Ellet@kartverket.no

Introduction

Context

• Presentation based on a workshop held by INSPIRE KEN in Paris in October 2012

• INSPIRE KEN: – EuroGeographics group (since mid-2011) – KEN: Knowledge Exchange Network – Open to any NMCA staff having interest for INSPIRE – Main activities :

– E-mail exchange – Webinars – Workshops or WMTS services, or both?

Paris workshop about INSPIRE services

• Context – Discovery, view and download services were supposed to be ready – Implementing Rule and Technical Guidelines about invoke and spatial

data services was under review by SDIC/LMO

• Agenda

– Exchange of national experiences – Discovery services – View services – Download services

– Discussion about transformation and invoke / spatial data services or WMTS services, or both?

Paris workshop about INSPIRE services

WMTS services, or both?

Contributors to workshop

Questionnaire for discovery, view and download services included: - Responsibility - Scope - Technical aspects - Conformance - User feed-back, monitoring

Colour coding

Negative

May help – potential solution

Positive

Discovery services

Responsibilities

• Which organisation(s) is or are responsible for discovery services in your country?

A well-balanced situation with NMCAs involved in half cases

Responsibilities

• Do you provide discovery services or metadata?

* The answer is indicated by country but represents in fact the NMCA attending workshop

Discovery service input It is difficult to define which products are in the scope of

INSPIRE

We have made political decision to document all our products by INSPIRE metadata even if they are not in INSPIRE scope.

The European Commission is happy to harvest also metadata for products out of INSPIRE scope

We document all our products by INSPIRE metadata even if they are not in INSPIRE scope …. but we apply filter for

European Commission in order to avoid too many error reports from the harvesting tool of EU

Discovery service input

INSPIRE has a thematic approach (one theme, multiple scales) whereas NMCAs have a product approach (several themes,

one scale) This raises issues for services dealing with existing data

NOTE : this negative point is also true for other services

Discovery service input

It is difficult to get good quality, INSPIRE compliant metadata from other data providers. Situation may be even worse for

annexes II and III themes

NOTE: this issue occurs to NMCAs responsible for discovery services at national level

Some countries are organising help for metadata providers: guidelines, Wiki, …

Discovery service input Granularity

We have a lot of predefined data sets. INSPIRE requires to document them by metadata … but it makes the search by

users more difficult.

Discovery service Technical aspects

• Which software are you using to host your metadata?

GeoNetwork is widely used to host metadata.

Discovery service Technical aspects

GeoNetwork CSW is a good solution regarding INSPIRE requirements.

NOTE: however, GeoNetwork is more a tool for metadata exchange than a real discovery service

Discovery service Technical aspects

Storing data and metadata at same place helps to fulfill INSPIRE requirements.

Coupling data and metadata is also a solution.

Synchronisation of data and metadata is a difficult topic.

Discovery service Conformance

Some NMCAs are late to implement INSPIRE discovery services.*

Some NMCAs have discovery services fully compliant with INSPIRE.

*This remark applies even more for view and download services

Discovery service Conformance

The validation results may vary according the version of XML schema (ISO or OGC) and according to the parser.

Even the Commission had 2 validators giving different results. The harvest by Commission generates too many reports with too

many errors, making impossible to analyse them.

IOC TF might create an integrated XML schema (with the best of OGC and ISO) or OGC and ISO might converge.

Discovery service User feed-back

Several NMCAs do not monitor at all the use of their discovery services.

GéoCatalogue (National discovery service website) collects information about statistics use of all declared network

services

NOTE : this point is also true for other services

* In some cases, monitoring not done yet but will be done in future

View services

Responsibilities

• How is the INSPIRE service network organised in your country? What is the role of the NMCA in this organisation?

The trend is to central coordination, either by NMCA or by another organism

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Responsibilities

In some countries, national organisation is not definitive.

There is some evolution to centralised organisation.

View services input

Some NMCAs will have INSPIRE compliant data before dead-line.

Technical aspects • What is the general architecture of your INSPIRE view service(s)? services or

WMTS services, or both?

The architecture (number) of services is an open issue, there is no obvious solution.

Technical aspects • Which software do you use to provide the view services? WMS services or WMTS services, or both?

Balanced answers between commercial and open-source tools.

Technical aspects you provide WMS services or WMTS services, or both? • Do you provide WMS services or WMTS services, or both? WMS services or

WMTS services, or both?

WMS widely adopted

Technical aspects you provide WMS services or WMTS services, or both? • Do your services follow scenario 1* or scenario 2*

regarding service metadata?

Unanimous preference for scenario 1 * Scenario 1 involves adding a reference to an online INSPIRE metadata resource in the extended INSPIRE capabilities. * Scenario 2 involves mapping all INSPIRE metadata elements to [ISO 19128] – WMS 1.3.0 elements.

NOTE: reason may be late adoption of scenario 2 functionality by the Open Source software community.

Technical aspects

• Do you provide the service metadata (GetCapabilities response) in multiple languages?

, or both?

Multi-lingualism poorly adopted.

View services Layers

Management of layers is complex: grouping of layers, layers for data out of INSPIRE, matching existing data to INSPIRE themes, … “Naming of layers is mandatory but impossible for existing data”

View services Technical aspects

The relation with metadata of data sets is complex and raises issues.*

* This remark applies also for download services

View services Tools

There are open-source tools (Deegree, Geoserver, Mapserver) that are compliant with INSPIRE requirements (at least, with

IR). Commercial solutions (ESRI, Intergraph) also claim INSPIRE compliance.

(foss4GI survey)

The INSPIRE extensions (e.g. multilingualism) raise some issues.

Be careful with ESRI tools for CRS transformation

Multilingualism is really required in some countries (Belgium) Multilingualism is also an issue for other services.

View services Technical aspects

WMS may be used with reasonable performances if levels of zoom are well-defined. There is big interest in case of

continuous update.

WMS is flexible but need more resources on server side and may be slow for large scale data.

Many NMCAs use WMTS to get better performances.

View services Conformance

There are (at least) two tools to check compliance of view services to INSPIRE: neogeo and the GDI test suite.

They do not check exactly same topics and look complementary.

Moreover, JRC has also a tool for conformance : GeoPortal proxy.

View services Use

There is a nordic project (NOSIN initiative) dealing with data protection.

Some NMCAs do not offer view services for free and need to manage access rights, that is difficult issue.

View services Use

The display of INSPIRE layers gives bad rendering (poor INSPIRE legends); it is almost meaningless for some themes

(AD, GN). Users prefer viewing cartographic products, traditional maps, at least as background.

Display of vector data is more flexible and may adapt to various use cases but this requires additional efforts (let

users combine layers, improve legends, …).

Visualisation is within scope of the ELF project.

View services Use

There seems to be low usage of INSPIRE view services

INSPIRE view services might be used more once data is harmonised.

Download services

Responsibilities

• Does your organization provide services for other organisations within your country?

Few NMCAs provide download services for other national organisations

Responsibilities

• Do services you provide connect directly to services/data

provided by other organizations? (e.g. direct feature type access))

Connecting services not yet adopted

Download services input

There is delay for some themes or products.

Mainly existing data

Technical aspects

• Do you provide download of predefined data sets or direct access through, for example, WFS?

– all : predefined data sets

– Denmark : WFS in future for harmonised data or WMTS services, or both?

Technical aspects

• Will you be providing an ATOM feed to satisfy the Download Service obligations?

Positive feed-back about ATOM feed.

Technical aspects • What software (if any) do you use to provide download services? services, or both?

Download services Granularity

INSPIRE requires metadata on data sets. NMCAs have many data sets , providing metadata is heavy work;

But providing big data sets would not be convenient for users.

The solution might be to manage parent-child relationship between the product (data set series) and the data set, in

order to provide metadata at relevant granularity.

Download services Main issues

Technical Guidelines went late.

We made our own technical specifications to be compliant with IR.

We expected INSPIRE technical specifications (and were late) but compliant with IR and also TG.

Download services Main issues

Download of tiled / raster / coverage data raises issue

Transformation services

Transformation services

Transformation services are useless : - Coordinate transformation already done by WFS

- Schema transformation requires too much knowledge from users

Coordinate transformation services may be useful in case of a very specific national CRS or to be offered by NMCAs to other

national data producers

Transformation services

But these services work on points or Excel files and would not work on INSPIRE datasets.

Several NMCAs have coordinate transformation services

Spatial data services

Spatial data services

Scope and objectives of the spatial data services IR were not clear.

Spatial data services are not priority for NMCA.

Some NMCAs have spatial data services compliant with IR level 1 (i.e. discoverable)