Best Practice: Standards for Geospatial Data

Outline

Public administration bodies need to work together with architecture, engineering, and construction firms as well as building owners, brokers, component vendors, operators, insurers, inspectors, tenants, finance companies, fire departments, health and social services and more. For almost all PSI, location is critical. Therefore it is esential that location/geospatial data is shared in a way most likely to be re-usable by partner organisations - and that means adhereing to standards. Most standards relevent to geospatial data are developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

Links to the Revised PSI Directive

Platforms, Techniques, Formats, Re-use, Discoverability

Challenge

The challenge is to ensure that information from different sources that relate to the same location can be used together. It is particularly challenging when 'locations' can be defined by many different means: name (in different languages and/or with different abbreviations), coordinates, boundaries, administrative district names, NUTS code etc. The goal is to make all this data available as open data, following open standards and open data models.

Solution

By applying standards, particularly those developed by the OGC, public sector information can be provided in an efficient and interoperable way to many other data sets and processing or visualisation components. Standards such as WFS, WMS, GML, IndoorGML, CityGML and SOS ensure standardised access to all public sector information with spatial characteristics. The Spatial Data on the Web Working Group is a joint undertaking by both OGC and W3C to make spatial data interoperate readily with more general data available on the Web.

Why is this a Best Practice?

By using OGC standards to publish public sector information with spatial characteristics, it becomes much easier to integrate this information with other data sets that are served at similar interfaces. Data becomes discoverable using standardised catalogues and can be used as part of initiatives such as INSPIRE, the European Spatial Data infrastructure.

Most of valuable public sector information has spatial components to it. In order to make maximal use of this data, it should be made available through standardised interfaces following standardised formats. Using open standards from OGC, W3C and others ensures a very high level of interoperability, paving the way to new businesses and further commercialisation.

How do I implement this Best Practice?

OGC technologiesmight be used to implement this best practice.

Where has this best practice been implemented?

References

• Timişoara Workshop Session: Free Our Maps (PDF)
• Berlin Workshop: Location Track