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Shedding Light on INSPIRE Conformity

Starting soon at 10:00 CET

Spatineo Webinar

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About Ilkka Rinne

• Founder & CTO of Spatineo• INSPIRE & OGC implementation expert• Professional user interface designer &

software architect.• Facilitator of an expert group on

INSPIRE validation & conformity testing in early 2015.

• An active member in other INSPIRE expert groups.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/iorin

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Spatineo Inc.• Independent European software company for

quality assurance of Spatial Web Services.• Founded in 2011 in Helsinki, Finland.• Offices in Helsinki & Berlin.• SaaS tools for availability monitoring, usage

analytics and performance testing of online Spatial Web Services.

• Our business is to support building Spatial Data Infrastructures that work in practice.

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Webinar topics• The vision: A working European Spatial Data Infrastructure• The kick in the buttocks: the INSPIRE directive

• What does INSPIRE conformity mean legally and in practice?• Current tools for checking conformity

• Work in progress: INSPIRE maintenance• Validation & conformity testing (MIWP-5)• Building the common INSPIRE validator using the best practices

from the Open Source world.

• What do I need to do as data or software provider?• INSPIRE conformity Q&A

• Send questions using the chat at anytime during the webinar.

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Lots of reusable data

Geographical names

Administrative units

Real-estate & land-parcels

Transport networks Land use & buildings

Human health statisticsEnvironment observation

networks & data

Population & demography

Ocean regions and features

Rivers, lakes, coastal waters

Species, habitats and protected areas

Energy & mineral resources

Water & energy supply networks Weather & climate

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A European Spatial Data Infrastructure

• Collect and maintain data at the origin, use relevant sub-sets of it anywhere over the Internet.

• Use it like electricity from the wall socket: You can almost forget it when it’s working properly.• Well-informed decisions based on up-to-date information• Enables spatial data based business with small up-front costs

• Effortless reuse of those precious spatial datasets requires good discoverability, data harmonisation and high service availability.

• INSPIRE is a means to an end: use a little legal pressure to make the EU member states cross the implementation barrier.

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Spatial Data InfrastructureThe best, up-to-date data

always from the originEfficient extractionof reusable data

Available for all at any time

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Thriving as data collaborators• In a working SDI most participants will be both

Data Providers and Data Users.• Your datasets will be used as self-service.

• No customer-specific formats or manual extraction.• Little control over the use of your data.

• You will be able to rely on other’s datasets to be available and reusable in your everyday work.

• Your data & service quality builds (or breaks) your reputation and public image.

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Working SDI in practice

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Poll 1

Could you rely on remotely hosted data and services in your daily work instead of using locally installed spatial data sets?What is the biggest hurdle in your point of view?

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INSPIRE Directive• Legal regulation driving European Union

member states to create a European SDI.• A really long project: 2007 - 2020: time

(enough?) for all member states to solidify their services and harmonize the identified datasets.

• Europe-wide legislation: difficult to change. Thus cannot technically be very detailed.

“Requirements that would not be hopelessly outdated in 10 years”.

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Technical Guidance• The recommended ways to implement INSPIRE.• Not legal text, much easier to keep up with

changing technology.• Detailed, technology-bound solutions to fulfilling

the legal INSPIRE requirements.• If a member state decides not to follow these,

they have to make an extra effort to prove that their solution still fulfills the INSPIRE directive requirements.

“Make INSPIRE work in practice”

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34 INSPIRE data themes“Annex” word refers to the theme grouping used in the INSPIRE

directive: Themes in different annexes have different implementation dead-lines.

Annex I

Annex II

Annex III

http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm/pageid/2/list/7

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We are here now

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INSPIRE Conformity?• Legal point of view: conform to the directive text.• Practical point of view: Conform to the requirements

stated in the Technical Guidance (TG) documents.• Automatic testing tools for INSPIRE

implementations only feasible for the detailed technical requirements.• Conformity testing baseline: TG requirements.• Aim to help the data providers.

• No official INSPIRE conformity testing or certification exists (at least not yet).

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Some existing conformity tools for INSPIRE

• The INSPIRE Geoportal Metadata Validatorhttp://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu/validator2/

• Comprehensive testing for metadata, but a bit slow, UI could be better, timeout issues sometimes. Free.

• Spatineo Monitor & Spatineo Performance https://www.spatineo.com/

• WMS & WMTS capabilities validation, emphasis on service availability monitoring, usage analytics & capacity testing. 30-days free trial.

• GDI-DE test suite https://testsuite.gdi-de.org/gdi/

• Metadata, WMS & Atom validation, QoS testing. Free (registration)

• ELF (ESDIN) test framework http://elfproject.eu/documentation/geotool/etf

• View & Download service & dataset validation, QoS testing

More validation tools: https://ies-svn.jrc.ec.europa.eu/projects/validation-and-conformity-testing/wiki/Overview_about_existing_validation_toolssolutions

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Poll 2

How is your organisation currently checking INSPIRE conformity?

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European SDI is not ready• INSPIRE is still work-in-progress.• INSPIRE Maintenance and Implementation

Group (MIG) and it’s technical sub-group are currently working on (among others):• SOS & WCS Download service profiles (MIWP-7a),• Metadata TG update (MIWP-8),• Yearly monitoring improvements (MIWP-16, “INSPIRE

dashboard”),• Validation & conformity testing (MIWP-5)

MIG-T wiki with the current work programme: https://ies-svn.jrc.ec.europa.eu/projects/mig-inspire

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MIWP-5: Validation & conformity testing

• Need for more reliable validation tools for INSPIRE metadata, services and datasets.

• Different validators exists, but the results differ somewhat from each other due to different interpretations of the requirements.

• No official INSPIRE conformity testing or certification for software products.

• No official reference implementations for INSPIRE validators.

MIWP-5 wiki: https://ies-svn.jrc.ec.europa.eu/projects/validation-and-conformity-testing/wiki

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Test Suites & validators• Abstract Test Suite (ATS): How the requirements should

be tested in any of the validator implementations?• Validation result harmonisation between validators.

• Executable Test Suite (ETS): a particular implementation of ATS tests that can be run on a computer.• INSPIRE validator Reference Implementation(s) are examples of

these, but not necessarily the only ones.

• Goal: Create a comprehensive official INSPIRE validator• Open Source license, ETS parts embeddable as libraries• Free online service with Web UI and an API• Up-to-date, well-documented and properly maintained.

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Open Source approach• Github, wikis, community engagement• Change management & governance

• INSPIRE MIG: manage the changes in TGs, ATSes and ETS Reference Implementations.

• INSPIRE experts & validator software implementers: find problems and provide feedback & change requests for ATS & ETS code.

• Options for validation software providers:• Use the official ETS RIs as part of their own validators.• Remotely call the online INSPIRE validator API.• If nothing else works: Implement their own ETS “ports” based

on the agreed ATS rules.

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Status (March 2015)• Draft versions for ATS tests created for WMS, WMTS, Atom

and Metadata have been done by a temporary expert group• Workshop in Dec 2014• ATS repos: https://github.com/inspire-eu-validation• Final report: http://bit.ly/mdns_conf_report

• Things to be done:• ATSes for the remaining Network Services.• Use case based requirements for the validator(s).• INSPIRE validator Reference Implementation(s) software for

metadata, services and datasets.

• Expert group members mostly working on a voluntary basis.

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Data provider 1-2-3-41. Define your datasets according to one or

more INSPIRE Data Specifications. 2. Describe the datasets and your services

according to the INSPIRE Metadata guidance. Publish & maintain your metadata records in an INSPIRE Discovery Service.

3. Design map visualizations for your datasets and publish them in an INSPIRE View Service.

4. Make your datasets available and extractable using an INSPIRE Download Service.

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Software provider 1-2-3-41. Make sure your software is compliant with the

relevant OGC standards (WMS, WFS, CSW, GML). 2. Make sure that it’s possible to use the INSPIRE

extensions in the published View, Download and Discovery services and metadata records.

3. Make sure that your software can ingest and/or produce INSPIRE datasets according to the Data Specifications for the Themes you support.

4. Test that your software makes it possible to fulfill the INSPIRE Quality of Service requirements with realistic datasets and computing resources.

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Fresh Spatial Data as Everyday Commodity

Available always 24/7 Plug and play: it just works