POSTER FORUM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Geoinformation for peace building, humanitarian assistance and development cooperation in Sudan (33)
Juerg Krauer, Centre for Development and Environment, University of Berne, Switzerland
[abstract] [poster]

The Success of www.myplacetobe.eu: A Personalized Tourist Destination Recommendation System combining individual preferences and GIS data (65)
Martin Goossen, Henk Meeuwsen, and Jappe Franke, Alterra, Wageningen University and Research Center, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

Integrated Web Resource Management : The NaturNet-CONTENT-Navigator (69)
Frank Hoffmann, IGN e.V., DE
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

The Global Roads Inventory Project (GRIP): challenges in developing a new public domain global roads database (71)
Johan Meijer, Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

The InGrid Catalog - an application to manage INSPIRE compatible metadata (73)
Fred Kruse, Stefanie Uhrich, and Martin Klenke, Lower Saxony Ministry of Environment and Climate Protection, Germany
[abstract] [poster]

Interoperability in Cultural Heritage: Beyond GIS. Effective means to find, exchange and link information (87)
Hugo de Groot, Wageningen UR, Alterra, Ronald Wiemer, Rob Lokers, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

Lessons Learned (94)
Erik Nobbe, Marien De Bakker, and Jort Engels, AQUAGIS BV, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

The role of the Land Registry within the INSPIRE Directive (104)
María Elena Sánchez-Jordán, University of La Laguna, Spain, Cesare Maioli, Italy
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Building Nationwide Spatial Information Systems; discover, access and process online (106)
Mark Wilmot, Mijke Romkema, Goudappel Coffeng, NL
[abstract] [poster]

Geo-processing Services to fleets control in the Spatial Data Infrastructure of the Republic of Cuba (109)
Guillermo González Suárez, Rafael Cruz Iglesias, José Luis Capote Fernández, Raquel Fernández Pérez, Liset Becerra Lugones, GEOCUBA, Cuba
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Dictionary of Geographical Names of Cuba using Geospatial Semantic Web (110)
José Luis Capote Fernández, Rafael Cruz Iglesias, Guillermo González Suárez, GEOCUBA, Cuba
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Towards a productive spatial data infrastructure (116)
Yvette Pluijmers, GeoBusiness Nederland, Jan Kooijman, TNO, Frank de Miranda, DeMiranda Consultancy, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

GMES Fast Track Service geoland 2: Status and Perspectives (118)
Infoterra GmbH, Steffen Kuntz, Infoterra GmbH, Germany
[abstract] [poster]

The 4-D Spanish Cadastre (125)
Amalia Velasco, José Miguel Olivares, Luis Virgós, Carmen Conejo, Fernando Serrano, Ignacio Durán, Spanish Directorated General for Cadastre, Minstry of Economy and Finance, Spain
[abstract] [poster]

Results of the Atmospheric data Access for the Geo-spatial User Community (ADAGUC) project (130)
John van de Vegte, Raymond Sluiter, Maarten Plieger, Wim Som de Cerff, Ian van der Neut, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, Hans Manders, Ronald van der A, Pepijn Veefkind, Richard de Jeu, Nils de Reus, Richard van Hees Sander de Witte, Michael Schaepman, Nikée Groot
[abstract] [poster]

Central Server for policy on spatial quality (132)
Leon van Berlo, dutch organisation for applied scientific research TNO, Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

Managing spatial data quality through automated validation by business rules at the Port of Rotterdam (135)
Jeroen Wortel, Frank Cremer, Port of Rotterdam Authority, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

Inspire Impact in Urban Engineering and Regional Development (137)
Florian Petrescu, Mihaela Aldea, Florian Gaman, Cristina Iacoboaea, Oana Luca, Iuliana Boiu, UTCB - Technical University Of Civil Engineering Bucharest, Romania
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Real Time Delivery of Radar Imagery using OGC Web Services - An INSPIRE/GIDEON Use Case (138)
Raymond Sluiter, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), Marnix de Ridder, John van de Vegte, Wim Som de Cerff, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

Developing and disseminating new spatial statistics at Statistics Netherlands (139)
Niek van Leeuwen, Duncan Beeckman, Chantal Melser, Pieter Bresters, Statistics Netherlands, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

In search of SDI best practices: optimizing the usability of mapservices by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) (140)
Johan Meijer, Aldrik Bakema, Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

Integration of Vector Datasets from Central and South American Nations (147)
Edwin Hunt, Armando Lobos, Military Geographic Institute of Chile, Chile
[abstract] [poster]

Making information on the living environment available (149)
Jandirk Bulens, Wageningen-UR, Alterra, Inge La Riviere, Yonne Mulder, Cor Melse, Erik Lebret, Netherlands
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Continuous improvement of NSDI in Croatia in accordance with INSPIRE (153)
Vlado Cetl, Faculty of Geodesy, Zagreb, Ivica Skender, Sasa Cvitkovic, Mladen Srdelic, Ljerka Rasic, Croatia
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

The supremacy of the Flat Earth Society in Europe (156)
Ian Jackson, British Geological Survey, UK
[abstract] [poster]

Ontology-based GIS web service for increasing semantic interoperability among organizations involving drilling in city of Tehran (163)
Nafise Heydari, Ali Mansourian, Geodesy and Geomatics Eng. Faculty, K.N. Toosi University of Technology, Gholam Reza Fallahi, Mohammad Taleai, Iran
[abstract] [paper]

Using Semantic Web Technologies to Improve Accessibility to SDIs (164)
Rob Lokers, Alterra, Wageningen UR, Ale Ganzeveld, Inge La Riviere, Arend Ligtenberg, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Registration of cable and pipeline networks in the Netherland: A unique solution (176)
Ad Scholman, Mia van den Bogaard, Cadastre and Public Registers Agency, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

Semantic Network Service Support for the SDI (180)
Thomas Bandholtz, innoQ Deutschland GmbH, Thomas Schultz-Krutisch, Germany
[abstract] [poster]

Why new tools were developed for the GeoPortal Network: Liberty United Project (183)
Bas Vanmeulebrouk, Alterra Wageningen UR, Rob van Swol, Marjolijn Kuyper, Jaap van Zevenbergen, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

ROEnv GeoPortal: A collaborative effort by and for the Romanian Environmental sectors (184)
Cristina Oana, ESRI Romania, John Samad Smaranda, Lucian Zavate, Cristian Vasile, Alexandru Badea, Romania
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Implementation of a metadatabase for a regional SDI for soil-vegetation-atmosphere modeling (189)
Constanze Curdt, Dirk Hoffmeister, Guido Waldhoff, Georg Bareth, University of Cologne, Germany
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

All the World's a Stage: Designing for Urban Play (190)
Ronald Lenz, Waag Society, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

E-learning tools to promote INSPIRE implementation in Portugal: Needs and opportunities (196)
Ana Sofia Rizzone, Instituto Geográfico Português, Portugal
[abstract] [poster]

Archievments and Challenges Developing the European Forest Data Centre (204)
Gerimantas Gaigalas, DG Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, European Commission
[abstract]

TransTools goes live : a European Transport Network model published using collaborative on-line geoweb tools (210)
Catharina Bamps, EC-JRC Institute For Prospective Technological Studies, Spain, Sean Newton, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

Organisational Arrangements for Effective SDI Implementation (216)
Tamme van der Wal, Portolis, Netherlands, Ian Masser, United Kingdom
[abstract] [poster]

Geoportal based on relational/distributed database (219)
Krzysztof Borys, GEOBID, Edward Mecha, Poland
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Proposal for an ethnographic study of spatial information infrastructure in Mysore, India (220)
Christine Richter, Gianluca Miscione, International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation, Karin Pfeffer, Yola Georgiadou, Netherlands
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Compounded Geocoder: Get the Right Position (222)
Aneta Florczyk, et. al., University of Zaragoza, Spain
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Reaching for interoperability - Experiences gained from schema translation between civilian and military geoinformation systems (223)
Dragan Divjak, Zvonko Biljecki, Mladen Rapaji, Aida Osmanagi, Geofoto, Croatia
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

SITNA Geoportal: Towards a new Integrating Scenario (227)
Pablo Echamendi, Carlos Sabando, Isabel Goñi, Miguel Villafranca, Cristina Sánchez, TRACASA, Spain
[abstract]

Shaping urban transformation through geoinformatics usage: An enquiry into evolving practices in Germany (230)
Marc Wolfram, Leibniz Institute of Ecological and Regional Development (IOER), Germany
[abstract] [poster]

Providing Customized Base Maps in a SDI for Physical Planning (236)
Theodor Foerster, Jantien Stoter, International Institute for Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

Catalogue Service Implementation for SDI Germany (GDI-DE) with special regards to INSPIRE (240)
Juergen Walther, Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy, Coordination Office SDI Germany,Germany
[abstract] [poster]

An SDI approach to provide information visibility for river basin authorities (241)
Miguel ángel Latre, Rubén Béjar, David Gayán, University of Zaragoza, Silvia Laiglesia, Mónica Vidal, Pedro Rafael Muro-Medrano, Spain
[abstract] [poster]

INSPIRE Coordinate Transformation Service - the Specification and experiences gained from a pilot implementation (243)
Janne Kovanen, Lassi Lehto, Finnish Geodetic Institute, Finland
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Aquo-kit: harmonised toolkit for the water management reporting process in The Netherlands (245)
Jeroen Nijhuis, Witteveen+Bos, Hinne Reitsma, Niels Lammers, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

CartoCiudad Progress: New Web Services Available and its Participation in European Projects (268)
Alicia Gonzalez Jimenez, Juan Emilio Ayuso Gonzalez, Ana Velasco Tirado, Jose Miguel Rubio Iglesias, Julian Gonzalez Garcia, Sebastian Mas Mayoral, Angel Garcia San Roman, National Geographic Institute of Spain, Spain
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Implementing WPS as an Coordinate Transformation Service (269)
Tomasz Kubik, Institute of Computer Engineering, Control and Robotics, Wroclaw University of Technology, Bartosz Kopanczyk, Poland
[abstract] [poster]

Modelling Spatial Data Infrastructures as Systems of Systems (273)
Rubén Béjar, Francisco Javier López-Pellicer, Pedro Rafael Muro-Medrano, University of Zaragoza, Rodolfo Rioja, Francisco Javier Zarazaga-Soria, Spain
[abstract] [poster]

New geo-services and their influence of the SDI development in Croatia (276)
Zeljko Bacic, Marinko Bosiljevac, Ljerka Rasic, Zoran Vujic, State Geodetic Administration of Republic of Croatia, Croatia
[abstract] [poster]

Developing a Harmonized Geographic Data Model for Turkey Following Inspire Data Specifications (277)
Arif Cagdas Aydinoglu, Karadeniz Technical University, Turkey, Wilko Quak, The Netherlands
[abstract]

Metadata Plans of Action: a strategy to promote the metadata creation in Spain (289)
María Crespo Martínez, Marta Criado Valdés, Technical University of Madrid, Alejandra Sánchez Maganto, Carolina Soteres Dominguez, Spain
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

NATURE-SDIplus: Best Practice Network for SDI in Nature Conservation (291)
Emanuele Roccatagliata, Giorgio Saio, GISIG - Geographical Information Systems International Group, Italy
[abstract] [poster]

Development of Digital Competence in the Spanish Compulsory Secondary Education Using the SDI as an ICT Educational Resource (295)
María Ester Gonzalez, Miguel ángel Bernabé Poveda, Technical University of Madrid, Spain
[abstract] [poster]

Access to Protected Areas Data through Geowebservices: A Case study in Portugal using open-source tools (298)
Ana Luisa Gomes, Alexandra Fonseca, Danilo Furtado, Instituto Geográfico Português (IGP), Henrique Marinho, Portugal
[abstract] [poster]

Opportunities and Constraints to Develop Geographic Data Models For Urban Land Administration in Turkey (302)
Arif Cagdas Aydinoglu, Tahsin Yomralioglu, Karadeniz Technical University, Peter van OOSTEROM, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

European Address Infrastructure: EURADIN Project (311)
Maria Cabello, Isabel Goñi, Trabajos Catastrales S.A. (Tracasa), Andres Valentin, Spain
[abstract] [poster]

Collaborative Working Environment for Building of Spatial Applications (313)
Karel Charvat, Petr Horak, Martin Vlk, Wirelessinfo, Czech Republic
[abstract] [poster]

Harmonizing Disparate Data with Spatial ETL (316)
Don Murray, Safe Software Inc., Canada
[abstract] [poster]

Geohosting: Publish Your Spatial Data Yourself (322)
Karel Charvat, Petr Horak, Martin Vlk, Wirelessinfo, Czech Republic
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Interactive Processing Service Orchestration of Environmental Information within a 3D web client (325)
Giuseppe Conti, Raffaele De Amicis, Bruno Simões, Stefano Piffer, Fondazione Graphitech, Italy
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

DIGMAP project: achieved results and future initiatives applied to SDI (342)
Miguel Ángel Bernabé, Mabel Álvarez, Alberto Fernández Wyttenbach, Willington Siabato, Technical University of Madrid, Spain
[abstract] [poster]

National Topographic Database Software (345)
Masoumeh Kheiri, National Cartographic Center, Iran
[abstract] [paper]

Toposcopy: A Modeling Tool for CityGML (348)
Annet Groneman, Toposcopie, Sisi Zlatanova, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

...kill your darlings ?!? How to disseminate Geo information infrastructures for a wider audience (353)
Jan van Sambeek, Geoloketten, Henny Beijer, Michiel Jellema, Jan Kooiman, Frans Lips, The Netherlands
[abstract] [poster]

Title Quality inspection and quality improvement of large spatial datasets (374)
Hainan Chen, Volker Walter, Universitaet Stuttgart, Germany
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

Spatial data infrastructures in pratice: Saxony's governmental forest organisation makes intensive use of Saxony's spatial data infrastructure inside their web GIS, FGIS-online (403)
Martin Stocker, con terra GmbH, Andreas Hergert, Germany
[abstract] [poster] [paper]

POSTER ABSTRACTS

NSDI and Federalism (16)
Alain Buogo and René Sonney, Swisstopo, Federal Office of Topography, Switzerland

The federalist structure of Switzerland with a central state, 26 cantonal states, about 2700 Municipalities with a lot of independence for each level is not a common situation. If you add the 4 national languages the situation is really not the best for a central organization.
At the local level we can qualify the services to citizens as excellent, but if the maxim "Act local" is present, the second part of its "Think Global" is not always a reality.
During the late 80s, cantonal states and cities have initiated the implementation of effective information system of their territory. This was done fully independent and without real need of coordination with their partners at the cantonal or federal level. After 20 years we have as results a multitude of spatial data infrastructures local, regional and cantonal.
Late 90s the necessity of a development of an SDI at the national level was evident for the Confederation. It was also evident that the NSDI should be developed at the national level in bringing together the existing IDG.
In the year 2008, a law on geoinformation came into force. The Law on geoinformation (LGeo) is a fundamental element of the national spatial data infrastructure (NSDI) insofar as it establishes the organizational, technical and financial conditions of the development of the geoinformation in Switzerland. The promotion of this law is the task of the e-geo.ch program. But, at this moment an SDI at the national level is not the reality.
The presentation should analyze the difficulties, the benefits and disadvantages of the federalist structure. Many things already exist at local and regional level but this don't mean that local needs are generally well served by existing IDG.
A solution to meet the needs of public and private stakeholders to supra-cantonal, national and even international level is not easy to find because difficulties to harmonize, fear of losing power etc ...

SOAP for Geo (30)
Lieke Verhelst and Karolina Orlinska, Grontmij, Netherlands

New national and European legislation necessitates the creation of applications in which mainstream IT data is combined with geo-information. Applications that support work processes involved connect organization legacy data with geometric data. A common way to develop such an application to make use of services.
The standards for services in mainstream IT are developed by the W3 organization, whereas the standards for services in the geo-information domain are developed by the OGC. These standards are not completely interchangeable, which hinders the application development.
It was the objective of the RGI project GoogleSOAP to evaluate W3 standards within a geo-information context by developing a set of proof-of-concepts.
The W3 standards for service oriented architecture are technically more mature and more elaborated as the OGC standards. The W3 standards for SOAP contain solutions for security and possibilities for messaging are more diverse than OGC's request-response. This creates possibilities for the geo-information work field. When in the geo environment W3 standards are used complementing OCG standards not only technical integration is accomplished but also the road to improved application scenarios is opened.
The project evaluated the following proof-of-concepts (POC):
- to prove that with SOAP WFS and WMS can be mimicked
- to experiment with styling and SOAP
- to incorporate the additional W3 messaging capabilities in the geo context. For this purpose the "dispatcher" configuration was used.
The POC environment was completely based on open standards: PostgreSQL/PostGIS for database, Apache for HTTP Server, Tomcat as application server with AXIS2 as SOAP implementation. The results were evaluated as mashups in GoogleMaps and Virtual Earth.
The result can be summarized as: it is possible to use SOAP in the geo context. WMS and WFS service implementations can be established when using GML or KML for this task. Possibilities for styling are available. More complex implementations of client-server message traffic are a supplement to OGCs request-response.

Geoinformation for peace building, humanitarian assistance and development cooperation in Sudan (33)
Juerg Krauer, Centre for Development and Environment, University of Berne, Switzerland

Accurate and updated geospatial information is crucial to provide effective support in peace building and humanitarian relief operations. From the very early stage of negotiations to final rehabilitation measures, geoinformation systems and maps provided by the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE), University of Berne, Switzerland have been widely used at all decision-making levels among Sudanese ministries, UN agencies, and international NGOs.
With only 10 km of paved roads, limited energy supply, a minor percentage of females graduating from schools, uncontrolled deforestation and extraction of resources, urban expansion and tribal clashes, Southern Sudan is clearly unable to provide basic services and infrastructure to its people. Adding to this challenge, Southern Sudan must respond within the coming years to the needs of an estimated 500,000 displaced persons returning to the region per year. Following a long and arduous civil war, Southern Sudan is now for the first time in a position to plan the future. NSDI is at an initial stage and national base line information is not yet available from Governmental authorities.
The paper presentation focus on potentials of geoinformation technologies to create geospatial information for the fifth population census, infrastructural rehabilitation and natural resources management by data integration, dissemination and modeling of terrain data, remote sensing information, digitized maps, field data and internet sources in the framework of a Capacity Development Program in Geoinformation Management funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

New technologies give in abundance possibilities of anticipating on the experience economy we are living in. Because modern people travel a lot, the tourist requires more quality, coordinated on its own needs and preferences. The tourist wants more and more objective information. In the travel world we see all kinds of activities arising, where a tourist can compose its own holiday on the basis of its own preferences using all kinds of Destination Recommendation Systems (DRS). The Internet has become an essential channel of communication and transaction for the tourism industry. In an era where society is making vast information resources available to anyone, at any time, from anywhere in the world, competitiveness of tourism destinations and regions increasingly depends on timely access to the right information. But Destination Recommendation Systems are mostly fed with subjective information provided by the tourism industry itself. More objective information about destinations can be provided using a GIS (geographical information system) that includes multiple types of digital topographical data. Due to the great need for better tourism information of destinations, and keep in line with the need of self control of the modern tourist, the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality is supporting research for the development of innovative initiatives to facilitate tourists access to interactive information systems. A Dutch website www.myplacetobe.eu, was developed as a DRS to enable Internet users to locate their own preferred travel destinations according to their landscape preferences, using all kinds of geodata. The application draws a personalized map of the Netherlands which indicates where the Dutch landscape corresponds closest to the user's stated desires. There are possibilities to zoom in on the map and getting more tourism information about that destination. All preferences and maps are saved in a database. This database gives opportunities to analyze the data in impact and assessment studies on every regional scale.
Beside developing new technologies there are other goals with this project: stimulating local tourism; using GIS-data in a more user-friendly way and getting information about tourist preferences. The application is a big success. Each day there are150 visitors on the website. But the biggest success is that 30% of the visitors actually visited the destination which was recommended. The website has been limited to the Netherlands yet. The European Union works with European geographical data, so an European version of the website is possible. West-European citizens will get to know the beauty of the East-European destinations and vice versa. This could stimulate European tourism.

Integrated Web Resource Management : The NaturNet-CONTENT-Navigator (69)
Frank Hoffmann, IGN e.V., DE

The Decision making process for Logistics, on Location based Services and, especially, about Sustainable Regional Infrastructure Development based on INSPIRE'd web services needs better Awareness on Data, Information, Knowledge and other Learning Resources available using standardized, interoperable Web Catalogue Services and web-based, semantic and multimedial eLearning CONTENTS to support formal Education, informal web-based-Training (WBT), as well as a combination of mixed "blended" Learning approaches. Therefore, IGN e.V. [ http://GDI-SN.blogspot.com ] as the Saxonian partner in the EU-FP6- Project-NNR (NNR=NATURNET+REDIME) [ http://www.NATURNET.org ] has collected and composed contents resources for the so-called NATURNET-CONTENT-NAVIGATOR (NCN) built above the CDS-2.x/3.x (CDS = COPERNICDESKTOPSEARCH-Engine, available as Professional and Commercial Searching Tool), [ http://www.copernic.com ], but is also usable as a free version for non-commercial, personalized Content management, e.g. for INTEGRATION of global knowledge resource links from the Web and personal Knowledge documents stored locally at users Desktop/Notebook/PDA and/or private Networks. The NCN (NCN = NATURNET-CONTENT-NAVIGATOR) as a collection of Metalinks has been developed for the NNR project and is containing Web-based Learning / Teaching Resources on Environment & Geoinformation supported by integrated Webservices according to INSPIRE (ISO-191XX) principles, containing such Awareness categories like Sustainability, Interoperability, Usability, … and is searchable by such important and challenging for SDI oriented Thesauri (like GEMET, UDK-DE) and/or Keywords according to categories of INSPIRE'd Web Catalogue Services. Special attention has been paid to integrate and use E-Learning modules about Interoperability, Sustainability and Usability of GEO, ENVIRO and SPATIO Applications publicly available on the Web together with the personal Knowledge base of users. The MOODLE learning management system (LMS) has been connected with the
NATURNET-WEBSERVICE-PORTAL [ http://portal.NATURNET.org ] for uniform and integrated resource management. This paper and PC_demos are demonstrating the indexing, searching and learning process with interoperable MetaInformation Systems and the usage of the NCN to access INSPIRE-oriented GeoWebservices and/or GeoApplications, as examples, to integrate WebMapServices in Central Europe or to transform GPS-Datasets via the NNR-GeoPortal-TOOLS into Applications for 3D-Visualization (as example for Web Processing Services for routing logistics, visibility analysis, or image interpretation) and/or integrate them with other Meta information system resources on the well-known 3D GoogleEARTH-GIS visualization platform.

The Global Roads Inventory Project (GRIP): challenges in developing a new public domain global roads database (71)
Johan Meijer, Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), Netherlands

The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) analyses spatial and social developments in (inter)national context, which are important to the human, plant and animal environment. It conducts scientific assessments and policy evaluations, relevant to strategic government policy.
For our global analyses PBL has developed a Global Integrated Assessment Framework consisting of a broad range of models focusing on quality of life (GISMO), land use and climate change (IMAGE/HYDE), impacts on biodiversity (GLOBIO), energy demand and supply (TIMER) and demographics (PHOENIX). For many of the resulting model-indicators data on roads are an important driver. Roads are used for computations on network analyses, market access, fragmentation, disturbance, noise, emissions and are input to allocation weight maps.
Due to lack of alternatives with a consistent, accurate and up-to-date global coverage and availability under a public domain license, PBL used the VMAP level 0 as the main input for global roads data in its modeling. Being aware that the VMAP0 data is outdated, not the most accurate and has other disadvantages for the use in modeling (i.e. disconnected map tiles) there was a rising need for an update. After reviewing initiatives like the more long term oriented CODATA global roads working group and the community driven OpenStreetMap foundation PBL set off to start the Global Roads Inventory Project (GRIP) which was aimed at, following the need, creating a global roads database under a public domain license. To be compatible with the CODATA global roads working group and to connect with United Nations agencies that collect and validate data on roads, GRIP uses the UNSDI-T data model for transportation infrastructure developed by the UN Joint Logistics Center (UNJLC).
After a 9 month process of country-by-country searching, acquiring, evaluating and harmonizing of datasets the GRIP version 1 database was released in June 2008. Many datasets were collected from national SDIs, NGOs and UN agencies. Although GRIP version 1 has a global coverage not all countries were updated from VMAP0 (i.e. some former USSR and small islands nations) and a few commercial datasets were used to create it (mainly Western Europe and India). Basic validation of GRIP against ground truth data was done by adding and comparing the layer to data available in Google Earth and the use of static maps found on the internet. Generally speaking the 174 updated countries contain simply more, more recent and more accurate roads than the VMAP0 data.
Challenges that still need to be faced are the appropriate license under which the non-commercial parts of GRIP can be released to interested parties, the current insecure custodianship of the UNSDI-T datamodel development and the need to collaborate with other organizations that collect and validate road data (like UN agencies, CODATA wg and OpenStreetMap) in order to keep GRIP up-to-date. GRIP website: http://mapserver.mnp.nl/website/grip/ (with Google Earth link)

The InGrid Catalog - an application to manage INSPIRE compatible metadata (73)
Fred Kruse, Stefanie Uhrich, and Martin Klenke, Lower Saxony Ministry of Environment and Climate Protection, Germany

In Germany, the InGrid®Catalog (IGC) is in use in most federal and state environmental agencies in order to describe and manage environmental data and information. It emerged from the German catalog of envi-ronmental data, which was developed over the last decade and has evolved to a quasi-standard for refer-encing environmental information and data in Germany. Today the IGC contains more 16,000 metadata objects from the federal government and the 16 German states. The InGrid®Catalog is the central knot of the environmental administration to the German Spatial Data Infrastructure and therefore an important part of the INSPIRE-process.
The IGC metadata subset which describes geospatial data and services considers the most relevant interna-tional standards, namely the ISO 19115 and 19119. The InGrid®Catalog is part of InGrid® which is the underlying software of the German Environmental Information Portal, PortalU® (http://www.portalu.de).
Our article will present the InGrid®Editor an INSPIRE compatible metadata editor which is part of the InGrid®Catalog. We will show the efforts that was necessary to fit the ISO 19115/19119 compliant IGC data model to the INSPIRE requirements formulated by the INSPIRE Implementing Rules for Metadata and present the experiences concerning the crucial data migration of more than 16,000 German metadata-objects.
Besides the metadata model itself, the communication interfaces have to be adapted. Following the actual Draft of the INSPIRE DT Network Services, the OGC CSW (Catalog Service Web) interface will play a main part in exchanging metadata within the INSPIRE community. To the present state, the existing CSW implementations do not support all INSPIRE metadata discovery options, both in technique and content.
Furthermore we will present some features of the application that can be used to build up an efficient INSPIRE architecture. The DT Network Services' commitment to the OGC CSW ISO 19115/19119 Application Profile (CSW ISO AP) for the INSPIRE Discovery Services has several implications, e.g. touch-ing questions regarding performance and topology of the involved catalog services. The software InGrid® offers an approach for those problems by the following features:
- Flat service topology instead of multilevel cascading services
- Harvesting of data to a central repository instead of pure distributed services
- Indexing of metadata in order to rapidly present a "mixed" result set with ranked hits built-up by responses of different data sources
The paper will give a brief summary of the architecture of the software InGrid®.

Interoperability in Cultural Heritage: Beyond GIS. Effective means to find, exchange and link information (87)
Hugo de Groot, Wageningen UR, Alterra, Ronald Wiemer, Rob Lokers, The Netherlands

Alterra is engaged in research related to the green world around us and the sustainable use of our living environment. GIS plays an important role in these research activities.
The Dutch National Service for Archaeology, Cultural Landscape and Built Heritage (RACM) is on a national level responsible for managing Dutch cultural heritage. RACM will be involved in meeting the demands of the European Inspire directive in the cultural heritage area.
Problem:Anyone who is interested in a certain phenomenon in either archaeology, built history or historic landscape, is facing a number of problems when trying to find information. Information sources are very diverse of nature and quality. The information is stored scattered over many organisations, varying from governmental bodies to local NGO's. Also the form in which the information occurs differs: ranging from vvery extensive and to a large extent structured, usually GIS oriented datasets to mainly documentary collections. Many datasets originate in thematic projects. As a result it is very difficult to find all relevant information on one single cultural heritage phenomenon.
Solution: Driven by four main national players in the cultural heritage area a national Knowledge Infrastructure on Cultural Heritage (KICH) is being build. The goal is providing facilities to find, exchange and link information on cultural heritage. Three main components have been developed:
1. The Information Model Knowledge Infrastructure Cultural Heritage (IMKICH).
IMKICH is a harmonized, semantic information model structured in a UML class diagram. It distinguishes geo-objects and document objects. The IMKICH model is based on international and national standards. The "Cultural Heritage Geo Object" is thus based on the Dutch Basic scheme for Geo-Information, a standard which has been registered by the Dutch Normalisation Institute into NEN-3610 whereas the "Cultural Heritage Document Object" is based on the Dublin Core metadata standard. IMKICH includes a mechanism for referencing objects. Since information on one cultural heritage phenomenon normally can be found in many different sources this is extremely important. Furthermore IMKICH acts as standard exchange format, so organisations only need just one import- and export facility to be able to exchange information with all the other players in the domain.
2. The data warehouse
The data warehouse harvests updates of the connected information sources. It acts like a cache that is designed to provide fast access to the metadata and data. The data warehouse provides the data services (WMS and WFS) and it is the back-end of the KICH website.
3. The Knowledge Infrastructure Cultural Heritage (KICH) website.
To be able to find information on Cultural Heritage the KICH website has been established. This website provides a combined textual and geographical interface to the information in the data warehouse. Search results are shown in a list and on a map. Where appropriate the reports provide deep links to the source data at the website of the data owner. Early 2009 a new website will be launched. This will be based on IMKICH2008, with improved search facilities. Search results will be downloadable in IMKICH format using the OGC-standard WFS.
Paper: In this paper we will focus on the concepts of the Knowledge Infrastructure on Cultural Heritage and share the experiences we had. Furthermore we will explain how the Knowledge Infrastructure Cultural Heritage fulfils several demands of the European Inspire directive.

Lessons Learned (94)
Erik Nobbe, Marien De Bakker, and Jort Engels, AQUAGIS BV, The Netherlands

AQUAGIS is consulting company especially to help public organization to develop solutions for workflows that include spatial data.
The last few years we collected valuable practical experiences for developing different types of SDI's.
From these experiences we come to a general approach of not only serving data in a SDI, but also real use for specific workflows based on different technologies.
"Blauwe Diamant": The portal "Blauwe diamant" is made as a cooperative effort of the province of Friesland, two municipalities (Leeuwarden and Sneek), the Friesian waterboard, the Union of waterboards, IDSW and AQUAGIS. Objective of this portal was to publish data related to spatial planning. Before all the organizations had difficulty to find and use the actual data. Especially meta data was not used. By implementing the GIS Portal Toolkit the framework was set up to investigate the possibilities and difficulties in using a SDI.
"Data delivery portal province Noordholland": The province of Noordholland received every year many requests for spatial data.The process to deliver this data was akward (time, money, delivery content, check licenses). For viewing and distribution of the data that is owned by the province an SDI was set up to search, find an use the data available at the province.
GEO-blocks: A number of SDI projects for water managers in The Netherlands have resulted in an approach to develop "Of the shelve components". These make the development of SDI's shorter and better, the interface if more standardized. The possible user will have a better view on the possible functionalities, so that costs and efforts are more in balance. This product is now used for different types of customers.
Conclusion and recommendations: From our experiences a good active SDI implies more than just serving the available data. Evaluation of the different cases indicate that the combination of data, technology, industry standards, good organization and agreements on what an SDI are al ingredients to make the SDI work. Therefore they all need to be addressed before an SDI will actually work.

The role of the Land Registry within the INSPIRE Directive (104)
María Elena Sánchez-Jordán, University of La Laguna, Spain, Cesare Maioli, Italy

ICT novelties have enabled the Spanish Land Registry (the institution in charge of recording rights in land) to go through important changes and to redefine its mission. Even if the legal effects are not changing, the Land Registry provides greater security for registered right-holders, who become more confident in the information provided; for example, double registration is avoided. The main change is the so-called Geobase project, which basically consists in using ICT tools to "graphically translate" or "render" the properties (or fincas registrales) that have already been registered in the Land Registry by literal description.The initial steps of this project were taken in 1987, but the project was finally developed by an Instrucción of 2 March 2000 of the General Directorate of Land Registries and Notaries (Dirección General de los Registros y del Notariado); the project is being currently applied to about 250 Land Registries over a total number of about 1,300 Land Registries existing in Spain. The purpose of the Geobase project has been achieved, at least in part (in those Registries to which it has been applied), through the Land Registry Graphic Databases, which consists of layers of spatial information that have been created using digital technologies (ortophoto, drawing tools, computation, links to juridical information). It must also be borne in mind that the Geobase project has made it possible to include a huge amount of different spatial information-for example on town planning, the historical heritage, environmental spaces and real-estate taxes-that had hither to never been considered by the Land Registry.
This paper analyses the effects of the Spanish Land Registry with regard to the different kinds of aforementioned spatial information stored in it, part of which has been entered in it, mainly through the use of ICT tools; in particular, the paper evaluates whether the Graphic Databases-which under INSPIRE terminology may be considered a spatial data set-can be useful in establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information, in keeping with the INSPIRE Directive, even if the spatial data stored in the Land Registry are not specifically mentioned in the directive. More generally, we will also make reference to the situations related to the territorial and spatial data in other European countries.

Building Nationwide Spatial Information Systems; discover, access and process online (106)
Mark Wilmot, Mijke Romkema, Goudappel Coffeng, NL

Triggered by global challenges such as climate change, public health and European and local legislation, public demand for geographic representation of information describing the quality of our surroundings is growing.
The last years Goudappel Coffeng developed two mainstream web applications addressing the public's need for nationwide uniform spatial data. The first application is the "Bereikbaarheidskaart" (Accessibility Map). The core function of this interactive map is to present door to door travel times across the Netherlands. This information is available for the present and the year 2020 for different time periods, e.g. morning rush or midday hour. Based on these travel times several maps can be produced for analysing accessibility. Accessibility is defined by the amount of people or jobs a person can reach (by car or public transport) within a certain time limit.
The web application gives the user the opportunity to view the accessibility for all zip codes in the Netherlands. At present there is a pilot study which makes it possible to add new infrastructure or remove a traffic jam and instantly the system analyses the changes in accessibility. The web application is public available, among the users are governments and commercial companies. First applications are supporting the decision making process for new business locations and to assess the impacts of investments in (road) infrastructure.
The second application called the Clean Air Policy Tool (CAPT), is developed as an joint assignment of two Dutch ministries. The background of the project lies in the implementation of the European directive and new national legislation on Air Quality.
Unique in this project is the active involvement of regions and municipalities during the development. By using an uniform spatial database (PostGIS) to collect as well as distribute data. All organizations were able to upload their own data into CAPT. This collection of data resulted in a nationwide uniform database which uses the best available and validated data for each entity, e.g. road traffic, air traffic, agriculture or industry. Further more CAPT incorporates a number of approved dispersion models. Using open source web technology, CAPT collects, calculates and delivers comparable and transparent results for the pollutants (NOx en PM10) today and in the future. Where concentrations exceed the air quality standards, CAPT offers the local and regional authorities possible policies to resolve the exceeding of these standards.
Since 2008 CAPT is used as the primary instrument for the yearly reports of municipalities on air quality. Also the instrument is used in project assessments and as a basis for the public available National Environment Atlas. In the future the instrument will be used to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness on air quality policy.
Both applications thus offer a wide variety of professionals as well as the general public the possibility to discover, access and process nationwide geographical data in a unique environment.
Bereikbaarheidskaart (Accessibility Map): www.bereikbaarheidskaart.nl
Clean Air Policy Tool (CAPT): www.capt.saneringstool.nl

Using the services and the cartography available in the Spatial Data Infrastructure of the Republic of Cuba (IDERC for its initials in Spanish) several projects have been developed about information linked to geographical elements. One of them is an application to locate vehicles based on Web to follow mobiles on vectorial cartography and raster, designed for controlling fleets. This application allows the mobiles' monitoring of a remote form on a network of communications, making possible to rebuild the behavior of the vehicle in a certain period of time, re-preparing his trajectory and analyzing his speed, detentions in authorized destinations or not, etc. by means of information stored in a historical database, it also provides to the user a group of tools for the handling of maps, similar to the tools of professional softwares for handling the Geographical Information System. Its architecture is focused to services, there is produced the integration and linking of several processing services and the distribution of geospatial information on the Web. It is implemented on free software platforms, it uses PostgreSQL as database agent, Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools as a tool to generate reports, GeoServer as maps service, everything is run on Apache Tomcat 6.0 as server of Web applications, the new utilities have been implemented on Java and it is nourished of the geospatial services available in the Spatial Data Infrastructure of the Republic of Cuba, as the services of satelital images and vectorial cartography. Nowadays it offers services to an important group of transport fleets in all over the country and its information is consulted by the users of the system.

Dictionary of Geographical Names of Cuba using Geospatial Semantic Web (110)
José Luis Capote Fernández, Rafael Cruz Iglesias, Guillermo González Suárez, GEOCUBA, Cuba

This document describes the creation of the Web Application "Geographic Names Dictionary of the Cuban Republic" using Geospatial Semantic Web. Describes the creation process of an geographic names ontology. The creation of the ontology is included in the CYTED IDEDES project and it is a case of ontology integration use.It starts on a database that contains the information related to a literary publication named "Diccionario de Nombres Geográficos de la República de Cuba". This ontology has been created in a semiautomatic form using Jena semantic framework. The ontology was refined using protégé and linking other ontologies to add axioms and relations with spatial meaning. It is also created a web application based on the Semantic IDE model established by the project CYTED IDEDES.
It is also created a web application based on the Semantic IDE model established by the project CYTED IDEDES. In it the geospatial web services ontology for services in the Republic of Cuba IDE, needed for this application,is created. Are also created services orchestrations in BPEL language based on predefined queries in SPARQL language for result recovering and visualizing.

Towards a productive spatial data infrastructure (116)
Yvette Pluijmers, GeoBusiness Nederland, Jan Kooijman, TNO, Frank de Miranda, DeMiranda Consultancy, The Netherlands

The Netherlands is struggling to shape its national SDI. The policy plan is there and widely accepted. It is called GIDEON - Key geo-information facility for the Netherlands, which contains an approach and implementation strategy for the National Geo-Information Infrastructure (SDI) for the period 2008 - 2011.
Geo-data Industry Organization "GeoBusiness Nederland" is critical about the effectiveness and speed of implementation and the way of monitoring its coming into existence. It therefore has initiated a commission on the SDI that has three main objectives to balance the suspected shortcomings of the implementation of GIDEON.
Sound development of the SDI requires restructuring operations within and between governmental organizations. With authorities in general a policy development precedes organizational innovation. The first objective is to provide municipalities (400+) and provinces (12) with an instrument enabling them to develop a policy on their own level for implementation of GIDEON.
This goal will be met by developing a "Model Policy Plan Geo-Information". The model will be validated in pilot projects within and between the targeted authorities.
The commission has sought collaboration with authorities that already recognize the need for this step. In a later stage through both the national authorities, the local authorities involved in the pilots and the members of GeoBusiness Nederland the Model can be disseminated to all other authorities.
The Model will be shaped in such a way that conscious choices will be stimulated with respect to the role of public and private sector. Moreover the common notion of the relevance of a proper infrastructure will be reinforced by distinguishing supply and demand of geo-information and geo-products.
The second goal stems from the awareness that a real step forward is necessary in shaping and conditioning the SDI by the authorities. Otherwise the private sector will be hampered in servicing market needs on the basis of public data and in expanding competitive expertise on an international level. To counteract this threat the commission plans to investigate and demonstrate the necessity by developing two business plans:
o One for a company that uses geo data for the purpose of delivering its own products to the market
o One for a governmental organization that delivers data to another governmental organization
These business plans, based on real life situations documented by members of GeoBusiness Nederland, primarily aim at illustrating bottlenecks towards reaching sufficient benefits from the SDI.
The third goal is to design a monitoring approach to determine the starting position of the SDI on the basis of indicators that enable future assessment of progress in the development of the SDI. Indicators will be formulated in terms of output, complementary to high level monitoring of INSPIRE (European) and GIDEON (national). The latter goals are mainly aimed at the question whether or not all supply side measures are in place. In the opinion of GeoBusiness Nederland the measure to which the SDI helps to meet supply and demand, is the main indicator of success.

GMES Fast Track Service geoland 2: Status and Perspectives (118)
Infoterra GmbH, Steffen Kuntz, Infoterra GmbH, Germany

After more than a decade since the first steps towards a harmonized European strategy how to benefit from spaced based Earth observation capabilities were made, the recent Communication by the European Commission on Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) paves the way for the implementation of operational spaceborne geo-information services for the benefit of Europe, the Member States and even the European citizens. From the next multi-annual financial framework of the EU onwards, funding for the generation and provision of Core Services and for the support of the integration of GMES services into the tasks of the Member States or European Regions (so-called downstream services) shall be made available.
To reach this demanding goal, currently the results of pre-operational GMES services from previous projects are refined and transferred into operational readiness. For "land" related applications the Land Monitoring Core Service (LMCS) is addressed by geoland2; a project co-funded by the 7th Research Framework Programme of the European Commission, which started in November 2008.
geoland2 focuses on the technical implementation of mature services for land monitoring on global, continental and local level. Three processing lines will be implemented: (1) Bio-physical parameters on global level to be provided in near real-time. (2) Seasonal vegetation monitoring of continents Europe and Africa by medium-resolution imagery in combination with an area frame sampling scheme. (3) Continental (wall-to-wall) mapping of Europe using high resolution data and local mapping of larger European cities (Urban Atlas). In addition, application oriented research will look into service evolution to improve the thematic content and quality of services and to increase the efficiency and reliability of the processing lines.
The resulting mapping products will be validated under operational conditions in various test sites in- and outside Europe by the so-called Core Information Services on agri-environment, forestry, spatial planning, carbon cycle, global agriculture monitoring and African environmental monitoring. They will serve major European and international user groups adding value to the LMCS mapping products by generating environmental indicators and services for European end-users. Together with more than 80 committed user organisations they will carry out an extensive utility assessment of GMES land services
INSPIRE is seen as a key prerequisite for the operational implementation of sustainable GMES services. geoland2 acting as an INSPIRE SDIC is ready to contribute to the INSPIRE process as a federating platform contributing to INSPIRE Level II content standards and the European land data model.

Traditionally European Cadastres are based on a division of land in 2D and therefore access to the 3D and 3D+time (=4D) aspects of real estates are seldom .
In society there is a growing need of cadastral information, and the new technology, the virtual offices by internet and the boost of Spatial Data Infrastructures that has implied INSPIRE, permit the easy access to all the cadastral data. And because of growing pressure and interest on land, there is a growing need for 4D (including 3D) information in cadastral registers accessible to users.
Main cadastral units with 3D characteristic are apartment's buildings. Currently individual apartments are usually not visible on the cadastral map, only the outline of the apartment building as related to the ground is visible. However, the rights are attached to the individual apartments and the citizens and other users are interesting in these individual data.
In the Spanish Cadastre, for every building the data base has sketches by floor in digital form. It is named the "digital FXCC" (exchange format for the constructions)
The FXCC document is a scaled graphic representation of the properties forming an urban real estate building.
In every FXCC the different floors and interior spaces are represented. The FXCC contains a digital photo of the building too.
This document is available via Cadastral Virtual Office and it is stored in the system as documental information and link up to parcel data by means of the cadastral reference.
On the other hand, in the continuous development of the tools of the Spanish Cadastre's GIS (SIGCA), the model 3D of the buildings and its representation by means of KML files over Google Earth has been incorporated as exchange format
A free delivered and down loaded application that generates the KLM format from the digital vectorial FXCC has been developed, permitting display every apartment of the 3D building over Google Earth.
The time dimension is required to be able to query how the status of real estates changed in time. In most cadastral registers, the time dimension is represented by a versioning of the objects represented by time stamps that indicate the creation and destruction of objects. However, the Spanish Cadastral GIS has incorporate the time parameter in a way that permits to reconstruct all the information graphic and literal for a concrete data since 2002.
With the new potentialities of KLM formats, it is possible too download historical information of 3D buildings permitting to navigate in the 4th dimension (the time).
All this functionalities of the 4-D cadastre are available to users via Spanish Cadastral Virtual Office, free of charge, 24 hours, 7 days a week.

Many tools and data formats exist for atmospherical data. To disseminate this wealth of information to the geospatial communities is still very difficult. It is complicated to easily share data among scientists representing the geospatial communities without performing some cumbersome conversions. ADAGUC aims to reduce the need for scientists to invent their own converter tools. Selected space borne atmospheric datasets are now accessible to a GIS system in order to facilitate easy data comparison, re-sampling, selection, manipulation and visualization. For example, for the first time several atmospheric data products (NO2, CH4, cloud fraction), soil moisture products and weather model products (precipitation, wind, boundary layer height) have been made accessible to the GIS community via OGC compliant services (WMS, WFS, WCS)

Keeping a thematic map continuously up to date, maintaining quality, saving costs, increase usability, increase availability, all at the same time (131)
Lars Holledig, Atkins, Denmark

Farmland parcels, based upon permanent physical boundaries (parcel map) has for a decade been used in Denmark in connection with EU subsidies for agriculture businesses. The availability of a now commonly known and used country wide rural spatial dataset has ignited an unintentional widespread use by private firms and other government organisations.
This paper will focus on a new setup for the maintenance of the parcel map. The new setup is organised alongside (and integrated into) a new system delivery for the administration of EU and national agricultural subsidies. It is using that some 60,000 farmers are economically encouraged reporting physical changes happened with their farmland boundaries, and it is setting up an easy web based reporting facility for the farmer. The processing of the update requests start immediately after dispatch by the farmer. A workflow is started for investigating the request, performing the change using in-house orthophotos and other information, and in straightforward situations the change can in principle be approved and completed only hours after the start of the workflow.
The system is web based for both the farmers and for the case workers and data is hosted in a common Oracle database and viewed/processed through open source software in combination with SOAP services.
For the farmer, the tool for reporting a physical change is integrated in his electronic subsidy application workflow and the consequence of not reporting a change is that the application is likely to flag out during the validation and he risk penalties for submitting wrong information. For the case worker, there has been set up a specific workflow for updating parcels with one person in charge of performing the change and an independent person for making the checks/approval. The relative simple parcel updating workflow is using a complex set of database procedures and service operations to manage the versioning and to ensure compliance with EU requirements for traceability. The updating workflow is replacing an annual photogrammetric update by an external supplier.
It has been planned by the government customer to promote the parcel map to an even further range of users and make it available both for regular downloads and WFS/WMS service.

Central Server for policy on spatial quality (132)
Leon van Berlo, dutch organisation for applied scientific research TNO, Netherlands

Welstand is the government commission overseeing the "visual decency" of buildings in the Netherlands. The Welstand-commission reviews new building plans against the policy of the municipality. The policy of each municipality is written down in a document that is called Welstandsnota. This Welstandsnota is a public document so every inhabitant of a municipality can check if his/her building plan will fit within the policy of the municipality. The Welstandsnota helps in making spatial-policy more transparent.
Because most welstand-commissions have to review plans for more than one municipality, they have to work with different policies. The welstandnotas from different municipalities are all structured in a different way. A need for harmonization of the data arose, just like the need for a (central) system that enables access to the data in a uniform approach. For these reasons the project "Central Server for Welstandpolicy" is started. The goal of the project was to develop a GIS server that contains structured data of all the different Welstandnotas in the Netherlands. All the data is structured according to a newly developed open standard: Information Model for Welstand (IMWE) that is developed according to the Dutch standard NEN3610. The data, the Central Server and the open standard IMWE are used by different target groups who have an interest in the spatial quality of the Netherlands. The whole project only made use of open source software. All the results of the project are also open source.
This paper describes the process and the software-components that are used in the development of the IMWE model, the Central Server for Welstand, the viewer, the import-tool, the transformation of current welstandnotas to structured data, et cetera. Even the report and this paper are written in an open source software tool.
This paper can be used as a guide to develop Spatial Data Infrastructures (or systems that make use of such an infrastructure) using only open source tools.

Managing spatial data quality through automated validation by business rules at the Port of Rotterdam (135)
Jeroen Wortel, Frank Cremer, Port of Rotterdam Authority, The Netherlands

The Port of Rotterdam has been growing significantly. Yearly increases of throughput put a strain on the available capacity and space. The Port of Rotterdam Authority facilitates its customers by providing land tenure, developing and maintaining infrastructure and providing efficient, safe and secure ship handling. The Spatial Data Infrastructure is crucial in supporting these tasks, since almost all data on port topics have a spatial component. Each dataset is maintained by the owner of the business process. To continue to perform tasks efficiently and effectively, management of data quality is one of the main business targets for 2009.
Until now validation through business rules has been managed manually by administrative procedures of each business process. However, the amount of themes, objects, object types, fragmentation of and relations between these has been increasing steadily over the past years. This makes manual checks more difficult, time-consuming and difficult to manage. Furthermore, there is a need of objective data quality indicators available to monitor changes in spatial data quality.
Automating the validation by business rules may provide a solution: it supports managing the existing administrative procedures in less time, enables defining more complex relations between data and delivers general indicators of data quality. When validation by business rules is an automated procedure, it provides continuous and consistent insight into data quality. Also, end-users gain more insight into the spatial data they have at their disposal and are able to identify business opportunities.
To ascertain the value of business rules validation, the department responsible for spatial data, together with the IT-department, have started a pilot project. During the execution of the pilot project it became evident that it is important to involve the owner of the business process. This involvement is needed because the required data quality is defined by the owner of the business process to perform its tasks efficiently and effectively. A set of properties is defined to which the dataset should adhere to. This involves relations between spatial datasets, within spatial datasets and between spatial and administrative properties of the data. Next the data definition is documented and translated into the business rules tool using a formal language. This step helps to rethink the data definition and provides new insights in the properties of the dataset. The management of internal datasets as well as of external datasets can be facilitated by these automated business rules.
The conclusion of the pilot is that automated business rule validation of (spatial) data is crucial in managing data quality for large and complex spatial and administrative datasets and contributes to more effective and efficient business processes.

The paper presents a project coordinated by the Urban Engineering and Regional Development Department within the Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest dedicated to the implementation of INSPIRE directive in Romania for two particular, but yet inter-related, fields of activity: urban engineering and regional development, on one hand, and urban cadastre on the other hand. The project was completed in July 2006 and resulted in a proposal for a law that defined the way INSIPRE will be implemented in these two fields of activity. Taking into account the present stage of the INSPIRE implementation Romania, the result of the project is still actual and is currently taken into account by the national central authorities.

In the Netherlands, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) operates the National Radioactivity Monitoring Network (NRM), to detect and monitor radiological events like releases during accidents with nuclear power plants, nuclear powered vessels and nuclear transports.
Detection of nuclear events can be improved by the incorporation of real time precipitation information. The Netherlands Royal Meteorological Institute (KNMI) operates the Dutch weather radars that produce images of the precipitation intensity, covering the entire country with a spatial resolution of 1 km and a temporal resolution of 5 minutes. Up to now, these images are delivered to RIVM in a KNMI specific data format. RIVM converts these data-files and puts them in a database for further use. As many different data formats, systems and programming languages are involved, this is a complex task.
A Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) can significantly reduce the complexity of data exchange. In this project we are developing an SDI based on an OGC compliant Web Coverage Services (WCS) to provide radar imagery in real time. We use the OGC web services framework at KNMI that is developed within the ADAGUC project (Atmospheric Data Access for the Geospatial User Community, http://adaguc.knmi.nl). The OGC web service approach has several advantages: RIVM does not need to process many different data formats, the radar data is accessible for many WCS enabled applications and changes in the source format can be made at KNMI without effects for end-users. Moreover the use of an OGC web service is very efficient as it can be used for both internal and external production processes at KNMI.
The approach followed in the project is a use case for both INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) and GIDEON. The overall aim of the INSPIRE directive is to improve the way in which spatial data held by public authorities supports environmental policy, by improving the harmonization of data and the interoperability of spatial services, ensuring better sharing of the data between public authorities and on-line access by the public. Within GIDEON ("Key geo-information facility for the Netherlands") a national INSPIRE compliant facility for location-specific information will be implemented.
On the conference we will present the results of the project with focus on technical issues like security, 24/7 availability and performance and organizational issues like data policies.

Developing and disseminating new spatial statistics at Statistics Netherlands (139)
Niek van Leeuwen, Duncan Beeckman, Chantal Melser, Pieter Bresters, Statistics Netherlands, The Netherlands

Different new ways to integrate statistics and spatial environment are developed by Statistics Netherlands. Developments refer to new spatial statistics and to the dissemination of spatial statistics and low scale regional statistics.
Displaying data from large datasets, like neighbourhood statistics, is an issue addressed to by the recent implementation of "Statistics Netherlands in your neighbourhood". This internet web application is a mash-up combining Google Maps imagery and statistical data from the 11 thousand neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. An interesting dilemma, since a good map is a simplification of reality, but should still be showing the facts as clear to the audience.
Statistical Netherlands also contributes as stakeholder in a number of subjects in the Annex III of the INSPIRE regulation. The metadata of these subjects and the data of some will become available as web services.
Statistics Netherlands increasingly uses large register based datasets for the compilation of statistics about Dutch society. Integrating different registers adds value to these statistics by combining subjects from more than one register. Integrating register based data by address is an issue here, which is currently being solved. A most promising development at the moment is the combination of register data with spatial location. New statistics may be compiled now, based on the location of subjects on the surface of the earth. This means that statistics are available for irregular and regular shaped tessellations, for statistics using distances and for time series. Irregular shaped tessellations may be contours of excess of noise or pollution or contours of projected water floods. Compiling time series for administrative regions from registers is more difficult in the Netherlands since every year several communities (e.g. municipalities) are confronted with boundary changes. Statistical data from different years are now combined with spatial borders of administrative areas for easier recalculation of time series.
Attaching register based data to the earth surface and to the neighbouring roads makes it possible to calculate distances between them, such as the travel distance of children to primary schools or the distance to the nearest public health service by road. A distance is calculated for each address separately.
Publishing different statistics based on distances is scheduled for the beginning of 2009. A program of subjects for different statistics based on distances is compiled and is scheduled to be published in the beginning of 2009 when first publications will be added to the program of neighbourhood statistics.
The paper presented at the GSDI conference will address the current developments of spatial statistics at Statistics Netherlands, the first results and the new ways of disseminating spatial statistics.

The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) analyses spatial and social developments in (inter)national context, which are important to the human, plant and animal environment. It conducts scientific assessments and policy evaluations, relevant to strategic government policy.
A few years ago PBL started to explore the options of using mapservices in support of our publications and work process. By using mapservices PBL wanted to offer simple interactive webmapping applications in addition to static maps and also provide access to the data behind the maps. This resulted in the production of various webatlases based on mapservices containing many data layers and although aimed at the general public, proved to be more suitable for thematic experts. Improving the user-friendliness of these applications is now pursued
We also recognized that mapservices could be used to share the burden of datamanagement between partner organizations using the same datasets. This followed the idea that data is maintained and served by the organization made responsible for it. At PBL the developed webatlases proved to be too complex for this goal. In order for a mapservice to be used in local work processes it needs specific tuning (i.e. performance, reliability, scale dependency, access to features, administrative SLA). Therefore PBL is now focusing on creating single datalayer mapservices that are more suitable for (secure) data sharing and can still easily be combined with other mapservices to create advanced webatlases. Examples of this are the Dutch GCN, Gebiedenatlas and Monitor Landschappen mapservices.
All PBL mapservices (100+) have ISO19139 metadata available, which is published in the PBL metadata catalog. This catalog is harvested via the CSW protocol for specific sets of services that are made available to, for one, the Dutch National Georegister (NGR at Geonovum). The harvesting of mapservices and the (unforeseen) use by unknown clients can however have an impact on overall performance, availability, life cycle and maintenance of the PBL mapservices. We are looking for best practices on how to manage this.

Integration of Vector Datasets from Central and South American Nations (147)
Edwin Hunt, Armando Lobos, Military Geographic Institute of Chile, Chile

This paper describes a technique that is part of a larger project for international cooperation in the field of small scale digital mapping, involving an interaction between technical challenges with issues of trans-national coordination.
The context is an initiative dependant on the Pan-American Institute for Geography and History (PAIGH) and its cooperation with the program of the International Steering Committee for Global Mapping (ISCGM). The Americas Global Map (MGA) is the PAIGH project arising from that cooperation. Among the objectives of the MGA is the creation of a continuous map of the Americas made up mostly of the existing contributions from individual nations in the Americas to the ISCGM project. The union and harmonisation of widely differing datasets presents special challenges; at the same time the special requirements of most participating nations and of their cartographic agencies requires special care to be taken with the harmonization solutions chosen.
MGA is currently preparing detailed plans and implementation of this map, called the MGA Continental Vector Map. In the process, techniques are being developed as a guide to the future implementation team. This paper describes these techniques and the special challenges they are intended to overcome. Equivalent techniques for harmonisation and union of datasets from different sources have already been tried by Eurogeographics in the EuroGlobalMap project; however, the context of the Americas is a very different environment in terms of current practices, available resources and in particular the legal, insitutional and administrative policies of the participating nations.
This attempt to achieve a union of spatial data from differing sources is special because so far there have been few attempts in this region to place digital spatial data from differing sources into the same geographic workspace with a common reference system, at least not without substantially altering them. MGA intends to try and unite the datasets with only minimal intervention, assuming that the general convergence on ISCGM specifications and the SIRGAS positioning system will ensure sufficient initial compatibility.
The techniques described focus on what happens at the boundaries between national datasets, where harmonisation is both technically challenging and politically sensitive. The techniques includes the generation of a buffer generated around the international boundary and also the use of remote sensing images as a reference; these aid the reconciliation of features such as rivers, roads and lake edges that cross from one dataset to another. The necessary tools and processing steps will be summarised.

Making information on the living environment available (149)
Jandirk Bulens, Wageningen-UR, Alterra, Inge La Riviere, Yonne Mulder, Cor Melse, Erik Lebret, Netherlands

There is a strong need for information on on the quality of the living environment for the general public as well as for professionals.. Environment, health and safety are important factors for the quality of life. Therefore the Ministry of Housing Physical Planning and the Environment (VROM) in the Netherlands started a project called "Atlas Leefomgeving" to provide professionals and citizens with this information. This is also one of the objectives of the Sixth Environment Action Programme of the European Community (2002-2012) is the Community's Strategy for sustainable development. Air, Natural Resources and the Urban Environment amongst others are important driving forces for setting up the "Atlas Leefomgeving" website. Therefore the Atlas project started to build an Atlas Demonstrator based on the INSPIRE principles. It is meant to demonstrate the use of distributed web services from national, regional and local governmental organisations to bring together all relevant data sources in order to provide adequate information on the living environment for the users.
The Atlas Demonstrator deals with content, user and technical aspects. For the content it entailed a harmonization process in which the different parties involved had to reach commitment on what exactly is meant by that information, what the desired quality should be and how it should be presented to the users. Since the information on the living environment is of a complex nature this is a time consuming process. The demonstrator contains only a limited part, but in future, the Atlas will be further developed by adding new themes and environmental quality indicators..
To make sure that the website was in line with expected user needs an interaction design was made. The expected interaction is leading in the design and it is anticipated on having user generated information included. By including the concept of social media users can form groups, leave messages, report issues, create their own maps and add these to the website.
On the technical side a services oriented architecture was used to create the technical infrastructure. In this way the distributed services could be brought together. For the demonstrator the national organisations and the selected pilot partners (3 provinces and 3 municipalities) had to set up OGC compliant web services (WMS) to provide access to their data. Since there is still little experience in this field some more or less obvious implementation problems had to be solved. One is that a standardised styling must be properly configured.
The metadata of the datasets proved to be an important base for search capabilities. The website not only provides maps, but also a lot of related textual information. These texts explain the topics presented. To be able to search these texts, Dublin Core metadata elements were used.
The first results of the evaluation of the demonstrator showed some bottlenecks, like performance, uptime, styling, etc. Organising the data providing organisations is a crucial element. Also harmonisation is an ongoing process. Metadata efforts are still necessary, not only for spatial data sets, but also for related information of a non-spatial nature. Nonetheless distributed information brought together in a standardized way did result in an integrated geoportal providing useful information on the living environment and a solid base for further development.

Continuous improvement of NSDI in Croatia in accordance with INSPIRE (153)
Vlado Cetl, Faculty of Geodesy, Zagreb, Ivica Skender, Sasa Cvitkovic, Mladen Srdelic, Ljerka Rasic, Croatia

It is certain that Croatia is on its way to become a full EU member which, we believe, will be accomplished soon. One of the challenges for the GI community is becoming part of the INSPIRE. This paper, among other NSDI improvement activities, presents the set-up and activities of the working group for NSDI technical standards. Mission of this working group is coordination, development and maintenance of technical implementing specifications for interoperable GI services for GI community which are in accordance with INSPIRE. Working group is acting in close cooperation with the technical committee TO211 at Croatian Standards Institute

The supremacy of the Flat Earth Society in Europe (156)
Ian Jackson, British Geological Survey, UK

The dominance of the topographic sector within INSPIRE community means that at times you could be forgiven for thinking that geographic information and spatial data had only two (or at a push 2.5) dimensions. Of the three spatial dimensions X and Y are very much the principal considerations. If you will excuse the pun, Z has a much lower profile. T = time gets a rare mention and a 5th dimension - uncertainty - little airtime at all. And yet truly modelling the real world requires us to get to grips with these other dimensions too. For quite a few years now, beneath your feet, that little understood spatial underclass - I am speaking here of the geological profession - has been happily operating in three and sometimes four and five dimensions. For them data models and software that can only produce plans or flying carpets have long been passé. To predict the rocks, their properties and how they and the fluids and gases within them move, has required a multi-dimensional approach. Adding in the need to assess and present the potential error within these geoscience models introduces the fifth dimension - uncertainty. Geoscience models now exist for a whole range of applications: from describing the geology and ground stability of major European cities, to assessing the movements of pollutants in groundwater, to attempting to predict and understand how we might safely store radioactive waste and carbon dioxide underground. This presentation will look at the development and current status of multi-dimensional geoscience models and their applications and pose questions about how the geographic and geological communities might better share their expertise and experience in future.

Organizations whose activities involves drilling, in city of Tehran cause several damages to urban resources as well as wasting money and human resources, as a result of lack of information about underground facilities, not collaborating to share information with other organizations and inaccurate data. However, if these organization share a standardized set of geospatial data in a unified comprehensive network and develop methods to discover, access and use of this information, can prevent collision of drilling paths.
Local Spatial Data Infrastructure (LSDI) prepares a way for these organizations to share spatial data and have access to the recently updated information of other organizations. From the point of view of SDI, to achieve this level of collaboration, several activities should be considered; one of which is interoperability among geospatial information systems. This goal is attained when these systems have full structural, syntactic and semantic comprehension of each other. As long as syntactic and structural heterogeneity are already handled by different methods, semantic interoperability is considered as the most important factor in data sharing. Ontology, which is specification of a conceptualization, can lead to semantic communication among systems by gathering concepts and definitions from different organizations and finding relationship between them.
In this paper, the role of LSDI to facilitate data sharing was studied, the significance of ontology in semantic interoperability among organizations involving drilling in city of Tehran was investigated and finally an ontology-based GIS web service system was designed and a pilot was successfully applied in one region of Tehran.

Using Semantic Web Technologies to Improve Accessibility to SDIs (164)
Rob Lokers, Alterra, Wageningen UR, Ale Ganzeveld, Inge La Riviere, Arend Ligtenberg, The Netherlands

In the Netherlands, enforced by law, basic registrations are being set up that provide access to information obtained by public funding for Dutch citizens at marginal costs. One of these basic registrations concerns soil and subsurface data. Although the availability of a national registration is an indispensable condition, it does not guarantee that everyone has easy access to the underlying information. Available data on soil and subsurface in the Netherlands is very diverse and widespread across organizations. It concerns a huge amount of raw and processed spatial data which is published through various information systems. In the near future these issues will be tackled by the setup of one national service for soil and subsurface data. What remains is the fact that all these data are stored in data models that use professional terminology, which is in a lot of cases hardly comprehensible by end users. The project "Toegang tot de BRON", literally translated as "access to the source", but also referring to the name of the basic registration system for soil and subsurface data, attempts to bridge this gap. The goal is to accommodate end users with a way to pose a query related to the soil and subsurface domain in the language of his own specific domain (e.g. environment, agriculture, hydrology). We use semantic web technologies to translate from the user domain to the soil and subsurface domain and vice versa.
Methodology: To start with, an analysis of the professional terminology in various sub domains was performed and existing thesauri were harmonized. This resulted in the BRON thesaurus, covering terminology of the soil and subsurface domain. Subsequently, an ontology was developed that enriches the terminology of the thesaurus with knowledge and relationships required to support translation of terminology between user domains and the professional soil and subsurface domain. A semantic shell was developed that provides an interface between the OpenGIS based soil and subsurface SDI and the end user. The developed ontology serves as the knowledge base that drives translation of user queries to technical queries on the underlying data sources and vice versa. In this process, the seamless handling of the spatial nature of the underlying data was an additional challenge.
Results: The basic registration will contain a huge set of (2 and 3-dimensional) spatial data. The interface to this system will be based on OpenGIS standards like GML, WFS, WMS and CSW. A design of an infrastructure was developed, that provides a semantic shell on top of an OpenGIS based spatial data store for soil and subsurface information. A first version of a web based application has been developed to support users from external user domains in accessing these datasets using their own vocabulary. The semantic shell translates user questions to the underlying datasets terminology and retrieves relevant information.
We will focus on the use of semantic web technologies to support easy, user oriented access to SDI's and on the specific issues that occur because of the spatial nature of data.

CEE Territory Case: The Role of Professional NGO for SDI building (166)
Jiri Hiess, CAGI - Czech Association for Geoinformation, Czech Rep.

The eastern part of Europe has changed a lot in last two decades, this paper describes the unique experience, how the NGO based on professionality and civil principles influences the healthy SDI building. After the iron curtain felt down, this part of Europe imported the recent advanced GI technology. In several years there were created islands of GIS, SDI embryos, with a strong governmental support. During that short period basic societal principles in Central nad Eastern Europe Countries were changed. These societal changes, factual instability of some official institutions, existing analogue fundament, plus web based technology, and user oriented GIS in the transition period implied the importance of knowledge, a new GI literacy.
It covers not only the GI staff, GIS administrators, technicians, but more and more users. Users in general, decision-making stakeholders, managers and politicians especially, as these user groups influence the SDI development and usage most. The live, working, and efective SDI in modern society requires independent and intelligent GI community. The CEE experience demonstrates a way, how is it possible to change the "paper-printed" information technology into digital SDI in several years.
The paper presents and generalize up-to-date SDIs exploration in CEEC countries.
The lack of funds led to mobilisation of brains, and caused even excellent effects in GIS. We can find here local isloated GIS, as well as advanced hetrogenous infrastracture including both commercial and open source GI technology, cascaded servers and web services distributed from sustainable nodes, operating on new standards. The SDI includes not only governmental supersystems, but also independent thematic, regional and local networks. The necessity of smart organization and educated intelligent users was approved. Users needs to accept and absorb the new information culture. We offer a concept of ECDL-GIS certified lectures to maturate different user groups, to involve and edificate specific target groups of adults.
CEEC examples invoke and illustrate the importance of NGO GI community for bottom-up SDI processes, for achieving cheap, user-driven, understandable, and accessible geoinformation. This sector is crucial for local SDI penetration, routine everyday usage of geoinformation, and shouldn´t be dropped out.
The experience proved that products and technology can be exported and bought, but the knowledge, related to specific domestic situation, to cultural-historical consequences, and mentality, the internal human sources must be planted and maturate in situ. Foreign experts iniciated this proces, but CEEC NSDIs were built in-situ by native people. The European East represents more potencial than threat. The ´low-cost GIS´ and ´SDI building know-how´ are remarkable, and transferable to next territories in the world.

Registration of cable and pipeline networks in the Netherland: A unique solution (176)
Ad Scholman, Mia van den Bogaard, Cadastre and Public Registers Agency, The Netherlands

As from February 1, 2007, all telecom, cable and pipeline (water, oil, etc) networks (hereafter: networks) must be registered at the Dutch Cadastre and Public Registers Agency (hereafter: Cadastre). Networks are now seen as independent real estate under Dutch legislation. Being a real estate makes the network an object, that can be registered. Therefore the construction and ownership of a network can be registered at the Cadastre.
The main reasons for registration of networks are: a. third party protection; b. transactions of cables and pipes; c. establishment of security rights such as mortgage and other restricted rights.
For this purpose the Dutch Cadastre has developed a method using GIS technology.
Former Administrative solution: In 1999, the Court ruled that a telecom network shall not be considered a movables anymore. This was ratified in a ruling of the Supreme Court on June 6, 2003, which stated that telecom networks should be considered as independent real estate. Already after the ruling of the Court, the Cadastre enabled the registration of network transfer by means of the establishment of tenancy rights to all parcels containing a part of the network. Therefore all parcels must have been specified in the deed.
This temporary solution had several disadvantages, such as:
o the network always involves only a small part of a parcel and therefore the cadastral parcel designation gives insufficient information about the exact location of the network.
o by registering parcel wise a split up of the parcel may generate parcel infection.
Current GIS solution: After the ruling of the Supreme Court in 2003, a solution was sought by the Cadastre to reflect the concept of networks being independent real estate. In the current registration the network as a whole receives a unique cadastral network designation. The deed then refers to this designation.
Also a digital network drawing is attached to the deed to be registered at the Cadastre. A network drawing is a pdf-file displaying the network in a cadastral map. This allows the location of the network to be specified with coordinates in the same coordinate system as that of the cadastral parcels.
Since 2003 already almost 1,200 network drawings have been manufactured by the Cadastre.

Semantic Network Service Support for the SDI (180)
Thomas Bandholtz, innoQ Deutschland GmbH, Thomas Schultz-Krutisch, Germany

In any spatial data infrastructure there are two general patterns for discovery:
1. Location-oriented: given a known location of interest; show me what is known about this location.
2. Feature-oriented: given a known feature pattern of interest; let me know where this feature pattern occurs geographically.
SDI only supports the location-oriented pattern, while it broadly disregards the feature oriented access. Semantic Network Service (SNS) provides means to complement the native strengths of the SDI in order to achieve an integration of both patterns.

Since 2003 SNS is provided by the German Federal Environment Agency as a shared tool for terminology negotiation and semantic interoperability among information systems of German authorities. SNS will support the German contribution to INPIRE starting with early 2009. SNS provides three vocabularies, in-tegrated in a Topic Map structure:
o an environmental thesaurus (UMTHES),
o a national gazetteer,
o an environmental chronicle.
On top of the topic map there is a set of semantic methods that can be accessed by Web Services:
o findTopics: search for topics by names and topics types.
o findEvents: enhances findTopics with temporal search conditions.
o getPSI: provides a reference of each topic with characteristics and associations (PSI="Published Subject Indicator" of the Topic Map standard).
o autoClassify: supports automatic indexing of documents, resulting in a ranked list of significant topics ("keywords") to be used in metadata about the document.
o getSimilarTerms: returns a "cloud" of synonyms for a given search term to assist a more successful full text retrieval.
o getHierarchy: a composition (replacing multiple getPSI requests) in order to retrieve a narrower / broader hierarchy from a given Thesaurus descriptor.
o anniversary: finds events in the environmental chronology that happened x years ago.
Today SNS is serving a growing number of clients among environmental and geospatial portals:
o PortalU (all SNS services, including keyword support for catalogue data for INSPIRE).
o Environmental Portal of Rhineland-Palatinate (meta data creation).
o The Bavarian "Environmental Object Catalogue"(UOK).
o State Environmental Portals of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia (in conjunc-tion with Google Search Appliance).
Geographical names are made available by findTopics in:
o National Spatial Data Information Portal of Germany GeoPortal.Bund.
o Working Committee of the Surveying Authorities of the German States (AdV)
o State SDI portal of Thuringia.
Since the German Environmental Data Catalogue (UDK) has been integrated into PortalU, the SNS re-quests findTopics, getHierarchy and autoClassify are also used to supply UMTHES® keywords for the UDK metadata (a contribution to INSPIRE by PortalU).
The INSPIRE Implementing Rules on Metadata however require additional keywords from a different source: "at least one keyword shall be provided […] from the general environmental multi-lingual thesau-rus (GEMET)". This means: there "shall" be a common reference to GEMET in all contributions to INSPIRE, while references to further vocabularies are encouraged.
In order to support this for the UDK contribution, SNS needs to incorporate the linkage between UMTHES® and GEMET terms. This is not too difficult, as UMTHES® has been one of the sources for GEMET.

As part of the national innovation co-funding scheme "Space for Geo-information" the project "GeoPortal Network: Liberty United" ran from late 2005 till the end of 2008. To promote access to geo-spatial information via web services, a network of geo-portals that is governed by a minimum set of rules was developed.
In line with the INSPIRE principle the data will be located and maintained at its source and made available using standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This service oriented architecture (SOA) consists of three layers: a data layer, a web services layer and an application layer. Users should be able to combine all components of all layers to answer a specific question.
Geo-spatial data were organized in several portals. The "Red Portal" for instance contains information regarding the built environment, the "Brown Portal" deals with subsurface data and the "Green Portal" focuses on environmental data. These portals were not meant to stay in place, they merely served to acquire the necessary experience with providing content. The web services layer consists of services to publish spatial data using WMS, WFS and WCS, catalogue services to discover spatial data, locator services to be able to georeference information and some processing services such as a coordinate transformation service. In addition to several internet GIS applications designed with a specific purpose in mind, the application tier includes a number of general purpose applications such as a service chaining environment and a discovery portal for geospatial data.
This paper will focus on whether the tools needed to create networks based on INSPIRE principles as the one described are available. Initially, we did not set out to develop new tools within the frame of the "GeoPortal Network: Liberty United" project. It was our intention to implement the network using existing software. However, as it turned out, not all the tools needed to implement the network outlined in this paper were available. Existing tools work really well for specific applications or in predefined environments, but a lot of the tools available do not strictly adhere to the open standards or do not use all possibilities offered by the standards. This prevents an adequate adaptation of interoperability standards. Innovations in the application domain are still a prerequisite to force these developments to take place.
New tools developed within the frame of our project include eXcat, a true OGC/ISO compliant catalogue server (CSW) and Luigi, a platform independent, extensible framework for the development of standards compliant internet GIS applications. Together with of the shelf tools which do meet the above mentioned criteria, the newly developed tools provide the technical foundation of our network. It can therefore be concluded that software is not a barrier for the adoption of the principles laid down in the INPSIRE directive. It is now up to the owners of geo-spatial data to take the next step and make their data available using standards compliant web services.

The ROEnv GeoPortal is a useful, concrete first step in implementing a comprehensive spatial data infrastructure at the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development. ROEnv GeoPortal is implemented with GIS standards-based commercial off-the-shelf technology and provides a mechanism for distributing the existing geospatial data resources to a broader community of users.
The ROEnv GeoPortal is designed for the sharing of geospatial data, maps and services between government-to-government agencies and government-to-citizens. Its purpose is to facilitate the discovery and publishing GIS data and maps to support the following environmental sectors: nature conservation, industrial pollution control and risk management, air quality and noise, waste management and water quality.
Based on ESRI and ArcGIS Server technology, the ROEnv GeoPortal is a cost-effective way to improve the decision making process at the national and local level for the following main target groups: Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development (MESD), National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA), Regional Environmental Protection Agencies (REPA) and Local Environmental Protection Agencies (LEPA).
The central focus of the Romanian Geospatial Portal project is to implement a framework that allows for discovery, query, and use of geospatial data and services. The project will result in an SDI Portal that:
o is standards-based, built on the existing information technology standards and ISO and OGC specifications
o is open/interoperable, allowing choice of databases, hardware, networks, GIS software and web browsers
o is engineered using SCOTS software
o creates horizontal and vertical integration opportunities to discover and use of geospatial data and web services
o is scalable to millions of users
o facilitates ISO TC 211 compliant metadata tool use
o is extensible to include government ministries and departments as well as non-governmental and private sector participants
o implements a commom architecture that could be implemented on both open citizen-centric e-government networks and secure networks for the national security requirements.
The major components of the ROEnv GeoPortal are: a) web site, b) accesibility, c) content management and d) administration.
o Web site provides the functional capabilities to publish and search metadata and visualize and directly connect to geospatial data and services over a distributed network.
o Access gives the ability to explore, query and use data and services through metadata catalog, metadata search functionality, search results process and a map viewer component.
o Content management that allows users to participate in the ROEnv GeoPortal using XML files and metadata harvesting
o Administration consists of the user account management and geospatial administration component.
The ROEnv GeoPortal provides wider access to geographic data and services and can serve as a catalyst for advancing Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) activities in Romania. ROEnv GeoPortal implementation provides users with a set of tools to easily discover, query, and access information on geospatial data holdings and services, including the ability to interactively display and query the data and services.
The deployment of the operational ROEnv GeoPortal will allow for the easy discovery, query, and use of geospatial data, Web services, and organizations from existing national, county, and local geographic information system assets.

Implementation of a metadatabase for a regional SDI for soil-vegetation-atmosphere modeling (189)
Constanze Curdt, Dirk Hoffmeister, Guido Waldhoff, Georg Bareth, University of Cologne, Germany

Centralized data storage and data exchange is a key issue in many interdisciplinary research projects that focus on environmental field studies and regional modelling on various scales. Furthermore the overall success of such projects depends on a well organized and prepared spatial data infrastructure (SDI) including the storage of corresponding metadata. Therefore the implementation of a metadatabase is essential.
In this contribution, we introduce the implementation of a metadatabase approach for a regional SDI within the interdisciplinary research project Transregional Collaborative Research Centre 32 (TR32): Patterns in Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere Systems: monitoring, modelling, and data assimilation funded by the German Research Foundation. The TR32 is a joint project between the Universities of Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, and the Research Centre Jolich. The research partners are from the fields of soil and plant science, remote sensing, hydrology, meteorology, and mathematics. They work in 13 project sections on exchange processes between the soil, vegetation, and the adjacent atmospheric boundary layer (SVA). The TR32 research area is defined by the catchment area of the river Rur situated in western Germany, parts of the Netherlands, and Belgium.
The data management of the TR32 implements and maintains a project database (TR32DB) which stores, manages and aggregates all data with their corresponding metadata. Besides geodata and collected measured data, further data e.g. publications, pictures, videos etc. are considered. The TR32DB is a combination of database and file management technologies combined with a Web-Interface (http://www.tr32db.uni-koeln.de/) including Web-GIS functionalities. The structure is developed according to recent standards and principles (e.g. from OGC, ISO and W3C). Programming standards as Java, PHP, XHTML, CSS, and SQL are used to develop and customize the interaction between the file system, databases (MySQL and PostgreSQL), Web-Interface and Web-GIS.
In this contribution, the main focus is to present the setup and implementation of the metadatabase for the regional SDI within the field of SVA. The following steps are necessary within the TR32DB system to add metadata to a project data file: (i) Upload of a data file in the file system, (ii) movement of the data file in the final data structure, (iii) storage of the data file path in the metadatabase, (iiii) entry of metadata by the Web-Interface, (v) storage of metadata in the metadatabase and (vi) metadata access for users via the Web-Interface.
The design of the metadatabase is developed according to recent standards like ISO 19115 for geodata. The amount and kind of metadata attributes which have to be stored for each data file depends on the data file type. For example authors, magazine, date, publisher etc. are essential metadata for a publication but not for measured data. Therefore a complex metadatabase structure has been developed with cross-linked database tables that are capable to store metadata. Entry, view and search of metadata are enabled by the Web-Interface. The metadatabase offers the storage of several types of metadata according to the requirements of the TR32. Furthermore, it is compatible to the larger metadata-framework of nationwide SDIs (e.g. INSPIRE) and follows actual federal German law.

All the World's a Stage: Designing for Urban Play (190)
Ronald Lenz, Waag Society, The Netherlands

The way we can interact with the city is rapidly changing. Mobile phones allow us to connect to rich content at any moment triggered by our (GPS) position, which has made the city a fascinating place to publish content to. But what truly makes a mobile city experience and what tools do we need? 7scenes, a new platform for GPS games and tours, presents possibilities to see the world as a stage...

E-learning tools to promote INSPIRE implementation in Portugal: Needs and opportunities (196)
Ana Sofia Rizzone, Instituto Geográfico Português, Portugal

The Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 March 2007, in force since 15 May 2007, establishes the creation of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE). With this Directive, Member States must organize and give access to data and GI services according to INSPIRE principles and common rules (e.g. metadata, data and services interoperability, geowebservices, access and data sharing principles) in way to promote and share the spatial information needed to assist policy making, implementation and evaluation of activities related to the environment.
In Portugal, the INSPIRE National Contact Point (NCP) is Instituto Geográfico Português (IGP), the national entity responsible for regulating GI and for the coordination of the national Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). IGP represents Portugal in the INSPIRE Committee, that approves the rules for implementing the directive, being also responsible for the Directive transposition, that will review the present legal framework with the participation of public institutions, in way to make it according to the directive and associated legislation. As NCP, IGP started in June 2007, the creation of a Portuguese INSPIRE Network involving the public institutions that produces or uses geographic information, aiming to promote the exchange of information and experiences to support the directive implementation. Additionally, a working group was also created at IGP that acts as the operational structure to support the implementation of the directive.
The INSPIRE Directive is a very important issue for IGP that regularly promotes sessions for its divulgation among the GI community, namely the public institutions, the private sector and the users. During these sessions it was identified a strong necessity for education and training on INSPIRE issues. There are a lot of doubts and misunderstandings around INSPIRE. Considering this situation, a set of training modules was started to be developed that will be available on-line using an e-learning tool that is already being explored at IGP for other purposes. The main objective of this paper is to present this work that is being done in Portugal concerning INSPIRE issues in the educational domain.

Archievments and Challenges Developing the European Forest Data Centre (204)
Gerimantas Gaigalas, DG Joint Research Centre, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, European Commission

The objective of the presentation is to share the experience and main challenges developing the European Forest Data Center (EFDAC) in the light of system interoperability, functionality and usability integrating different datasets, tools and applications. The EFDAC hosted by the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Commission has been established to supply European Union decision-makers with processed, quality checked and timely policy relevant forest data and information within the EU.
As part of the joint system and covering the thematic aspects of forests and forest related applications in EU, the European Forest Data Center (EFDAC) has been established within the JRC to constitute the primary focal point for information on forest related issues. The role and features of EFDAC evolves in line with the setting up of the Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS).
The recently established EFDAC provides a gateway to data holdings and information on forest resources in Europe. In addition, the EFDAC supports the generation of value-added forest indicators on sustainable forest management on the basis of data collected by the Member States. The EFDAC resides in meta-data and data servers outside JRC, therefore the EFDAC technical platform is targeted to be interoperable with such external nodes for the exchange of meta-data and data. The framework for such interoperability is set by the INSPIRE Directive. Developing the EFDAC technical platform the core issues is to make it compliant with the relevant INSPIRE Implementing Rules and interoperable with other INSPIRE systems, in particular the EU-Geoportal.
The EFDAC is built on the basis of existing systems, such as the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), the Forest Focus database, the European Forest Information and Communication Platform (EFICP) as well as integrates tools and applications developed by JRC (EFDAC MapViewer, EFDAC Metadata Catalogue and it's management system). Therefore the integration of existing datasets, tools and applications insuring the overall system's interoperability is the main challenge and goal for the further development of EFDAC.

TransTools goes live : a European Transport Network model published using collaborative on-line geoweb tools (210).
Catharina Bamps, EC-JRC Institute For Prospective Technological Studies, Spain, Sean Newton, The Netherlands

TRANSTOOLS (TOOLS for Transport Forecasting and Scenario Testing) is a transport network model covering the whole of Europe (55 countries), all modes, both passengers and freight, as well as intermodal transport in Europe with all medium and long distance modes (cars, vans, trucks, train, inland waterways, ships and air transport).
The TRANSTOOLS model contains integrated, conceptual transport networks that are seamless at European level : Road network (passenger and freight), Rail network (passenger and freight), Inland waterway (freight), Air network (passenger).
TRANSTOOLS is an intellectual property rights free instrument, with open architecture in order to facilitate access by potential users and developers. Currently, the model components are integrated into a commercial GIS-software which allows the user to edit, operate (geoprocessing framework) and illustrate results from the same common GIS-based platform.
Being a very large and detailed model, TRANSTOOLS has a long run time (3 to 5 days for a complete iteration) and processes important amounts of data (output of 5GB), meaning that powerful dedicated servers are needed for its use. In addition, although the model as such is free, TRANSTOOLS requires a number of commercial software applications to run on.
One of the major challenges in applying a model of this scale, is the need to maintain the network models. Enabling a large team of developers to work in parallel, each focusing upon their own area of knowledge would offer a distinct advantage.
Therefore, in order to promote access to the model and collaborative working practices, specific Inspire-compliant geoweb tools are being developed both in a commercial GIS-environment and with open GIS protocols as to increase the visibility and transparency of the model and stimulate the development of further extensions and applications of the model.
A first step - sharing maps, transport networks and data - is to make WMS (web mapping services) and WFS (web feature services) available both with the ArcGIS Server technology, ArcGIS Explorer and a graphical WIKI-like online GIS editing Tool (Demis BV) in order to provide synergetic on-line geoweb tools (commercial software, open GIS protocols and freeware). A second and more ambitious step - sharing models - is to publish the geoprocessing models to the Internet.

Organisational Arrangements for Effective SDI Implementation (216)
Tamme van der Wal, Portolis, Netherlands, Ian Masser, United Kingdom

Organizational barriers hamper the developments of SDI. Now that integration is technological feasible and manageable it is the organizational motivation that is preventing SDI from taking off. Organisational development is not in phase with technological development. Cases in the Netherlands, Australia and USA among others are used to show the need for new cross-organisational arrangements. Also, new techniques are required for the inclusion of SDI services in life-cycle analyses and information systems evaluations. To deal with these organisational barriers has become a critical success factor in SDI development.

Geoportal based on relational/distributed database (219)
Krzysztof Borys, GEOBID, Edward Mecha, Poland

The main feature of the GEOPORTAL solution is making use of the services provided by specific nodes of data infrastructure. Where it is possible ISO or OGC standards have been used, which applies in particular to the WMS/WFS services.
The concept based upon the making services available means, that lower rank nodes shall not send data to upper rank nodes, but rather the upper rank nodes shall download data from the lower ranks.
A general principle has been assumed that maps will be downloaded by customers in raster form (WMS format). Vector data (WFS format) will be available for downloading only by specialized nodes, for the purpose of analyzing them or processing them, for example for the purpose of providing the service of plot location, updating of buildings in TBD, updating of PRG borders, or preparation by a specialized node of maps in various formats.
Map distribution service, or WMS service has been divided into two categories:1. the service providing access to public data, 2. the service providing access to non-public (protected) data
The data made available via services included in the former category are the basis of GEOPORTAL, and while they are publicly available they enjoy a wide interest. The data is stored at various levels (county, provincial, central one). To provide the required efficiency, distribution of data directly from the locations where it is generated is assumed.
The users of GEOPORTAL when viewing the maps shall at the same time make use of central level data (e.g. administrative borders, ortho-photomap), as well as the county level data (e.g. plot borders, address points).
The latter (second) category concerns data with limited access. Access may be limited both to an area (for example to one administrative/registration unit) or to specific themes (for example restricted only to water distribution/sewage network).

To date, little empirical research exists about the emergence of spatial data infrastructures, especially in the developing world. At the same time many transitional economies are investing into the development of SDIs hoping to better tackle real issues like food security and water supply based on improved access to and use of spatial information (Georgiadou et al, 2006).
The paper will outline arguments for an ethnographic study of spatial information infrastructure for tackling multiple aspects of urban deprivation in Mysore in the Indian state of Karnataka, based on the findings from a SDI literature review, information systems research, and a pilot study in August 2008.
The pilot study showed that not only form and uses of spatial information are heterogeneous, but also perceptions of the nature of spatial information. Information technology and the use of geographic information systems are currently emerging in "pockets" across the city, and mainly rest with private consultants.
Firstly, we argue to approach these heterogeneous elements as "dots" of an already existing, submerged spatial information infrastructure. Therefore, the concept of "evolving installed base" from information infrastructure theory provides the starting point to this study. This point of departure recognizes constraints as well as opportunities in existing information use and sharing arrangements.
Furthermore, we argue that various locally specific forms spatial information are embedded in the flow of information and can be studied by "unearthing the narratives behind boring aspects of information infrastructure" (Star, 2002) by following the flow of perceptible forms of information (artifacts).
Finally, in order to further account for the socio- not only- technical character of the information infrastructure and its embeddedness in the Indian socio-political context we propose to consider institutions as part of the installed base and to look specifically at the relationship between information infrastructure and institutions.
We propose an ethnographic study of work practices surrounding the flow of information artifacts as "window" into this relationship for three reasons. Firstly, it allows us to "dig out" the submerged information infrastructure and describe and analyze connections between actors as they exist and evolve as well as changes in information as it travels. Secondly, the study of existing routine practices opens a path into possibilities for fostering SII development (through institutionalization, de-institutionalization). Thirdly, such a study avoids overlooking or ignoring distinctly local perceptions of what constitutes spatial information and information potentially useful to tackle multiple aspects of urban deprivation.
In sum, through thick description and analysis of information flows and work practices we want to find opportunities to foster incremental cultivation of SII in Mysore.
Through the institutional link the study will contribute to the theory of how SII evolves as installed base within a specific socio-political context.
References:
Georgiadou, Y. et al (2006). "Implementation of Spatial Data Infrastructures in Transitional Economies." Information Technology for Development: 12(4): 247-253.
Star, Susan Leigh (2002). "Infrastructure and ethnographic practice." Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems: 14(2): 107-122

Compunded Geocoder: Get the Right Position (222)
Aneta Jadwiga Florczyk, Francisco Javier Lopez-Pellicer, David Gayan, Pedro Rodrigo-Cardiel, Miguel Angel Latre, Javier Nogueras-Iso. From either Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, University of Zaragoza or GeoSpatiumLab

The geocoding concept has been widely disputed in the literature over time. The last trend is to define the geocoding task as the act of turning descriptive locational data such as a postal address or a named place into an absolute geographic reference. As a result, a geocoding system should process not only simple address but also the description of relative locations. There does not exist also restriction on the geocoded spatial output, as it might be a point, a polygon or a three-dimensional geospatial entity. The most popular manner of providing the geocoding functionality is a geocoding service. Presently, there are lots of geocoding services with diverse characteristics. The differences among them are determined by the quality of service (QoS), the provided data and the access conditions (terms of service, ToS) and the business model. Other differences are the type of content (addresses, points of interest, historical names, etc) and coverage (Spain, the world). QoS is influenced by factors that depend on the QoS requirements (response time, reliability) and quality of the spatial data. ToS classify services in services of paid access, free services with restricted use, and services of free use. We can find three geocoder business models which are commercial (e.g. Google, http://maps.google.com, ViaMichelin, http://www.viamichelin.com, or Yahoo, http://maps.yahoo.com), public service and community (e.g. GeoNames, http://www.geonames.org, OpenStreetMap, http://www.openstreetmap.org). Commercial providers supply dedicated paid services that are adjusted to the customer needs and guarantee the quality of data and service. The free access service, frequently provided by public services and communities, is free of fees but provides less quality. Usually, the leading commercial suppliers (e.g. Google, ViaMichelin or Yahoo) also offer free access to their geocoding services but provides data of lower quality and impose additional use restrictions involving the provided data (reuse, presentation) and the service access (rate limit, number of requests per day). Nowadays, there is no problem in access to geocoding providers but choosing the proper one. The vast heterogeneity in geocoding services sets up the problem of supplier selection which remains open. This paper presents an architectural approach for compound geocoding Web services built above diverse geographic information Web services, especially the gazetteer and geocoding services. This architecture satisfies the user needs for an adaptive geocoding service of general purpose, which is a core component of advanced geocoding (geolocating).

Development of spatial data infrastructure as support for the economy of a modern state is a demanding and long lasting process that is under way in most of developed countries. As the foundation for NSDI, it is indispensable to establish a complex multipurpose topographic system that is oriented towards wide range of professional users in various industries. Well organized and regularly updated database of digital spatial information raises quality and functionality of both topographic and cartographic data and serves as the basis for production of paper maps.
One of the main principles of the e-Croatia concept that was initiated by Croatian government is based on single information acquisition and their multiple usages. Since Croatian State Geodetic Administration (SGA) started with activities on establishment of spatial information system for the Program on State Survey and Real Property Cadastre, it is only logical to use these data in development of the Military geoinformation system - VoGIS. Therefore, to develop military geoinformation system as fast and as rationally as possible, topographic data and conceptual model from civilian CROTIS model was taken as the starting point. Using data from existing civilian topographic database, Ministry of Defense of Republic of Croatia joined the SGA in the process of formation of a new cartographic system based on the topographic and cartographic database, leaving the traditional procedure of updating paper maps.
With this project, Ministry of Defense took an active role in creation of Croatian NSDI co-financing data acquisition through partnership with the SGA.
This paper describes technical aspects of integration of civilian and military topographic and cartographic databases of different scales, i.e. different levels of accuracy. The importance of standardization as support for interoperability among systems was experienced in reality. Lessons learned from this project brought up many issues, which need to be solved. Recommendations from INSPIRE will help us solve these issues.

SITNA Geoportal: Towards a new Integrating Scenario (227)
Pablo Echamendi, Carlos Sabando, Isabel Goñi, Miguel Villafranca, Cristina Sánchez, TRACASA, Spain

The Navarre Territorial Information System (SITNA), is the organised set of human, technological and organisational resources which make up and regularly update, manage and distribute information on the territory of Navarre. SITNA aims to incorporate all information referring to the territory of Navarre and make sure that this is available wherever, whenever and however it is required. The internet is one of the most popular distribution channels.
SITNA's website has exhibited the vast majority of territorial information which is generated by public administrations and other public and private entities from the region of Navarre (Spain). Since it was set up, it has provided a service not only to society but also to public administrations by providing them with data (orthoimages, different scale cartography and thematic maps, etc.) and tools which they need to make decisions. Over the last few years, developing IDENA has made it possible to substantially enlarge what SITNA's WEBSITE can offer and it has also supposed adopting principles from the INSPIRE Directive.
Since it started, SITNA has been an essentially evolving project, which over the years has been growing and adapting to the demands and trends of each moment and, for this reason, it has not escaped the fast evolution if not revolution in the world of geographic information technologies, both from a conceptual and technological point of view. The current situation clearly paints us a scenario encouraging relocation, access to data and services distributed by means of all types of devices making use of the inter-operability made possible and promoted by the use of common standards and specifications.
Within this perspective, SITNA decided to reconsider the role of its geographic portal and move towards a new design for contents, services and technological components. The result has been evolving from a Web portal, until now centred exclusively on a search engine and displaying information, towards a Geoportal, which compiles and structures the whole data and public service offer for the territory of Navarre.
Following INSPIRE philosophy, the new SITNA Geoportal, published in December 2008, was created with the objective to make access to geospatial information easier, faster and cheaper. In short, geographic data, services and resources should be shared as much as possible, strengthening the efficacy of e-government and generally satisfying whoever might need to use it. For all these reasons, we can say that the new SITNA Geoportal is, in terms of concept and services, an SDI Geoportal.
As a main conclusion, the SITNA project, like many other initiatives, is rapidly changing from corporatism and restricted information distribution to infrastructures which are more open to citizens, companies, research and the market in general. This is the real challenge for the new geoportal, and for SITNA in general, over the next few years.

The usage of geoinformatics (GI) in urban planning and policy making is expanding rapidly. Starting from traditional application fields such as surveying and cadastre production, a large number of new usages has emerged within a short period of time. From the operative to the strategic level, the range of data used, of purposes targeted, and of technologies employed is therefore considerable - and so is the spectrum of interdependencies regarding actor constellations and planning processes. Therefore, while mainstreams in local GI usage may reflect dominant orientations in urban planning, it is the disparities that illustrate the available room for manoeuvre in this adoption process, and which are instructive for steering towards societal objectives.
Key factors that influence GI adoption and usage are the emergence of technology-centered governance structures and policy fields (e.g. Spatial Data Infrastructures, IT strategies and initiatives), the re-organisation of public administration (new public management, e-government), regional economic structural change (knowledge economy), as well as new requirements regarding the subjects and procedures of planning processes (e.g. strategic environmental assessment, noise mapping, air quality plans). Moreover, especially the local institutional setting, available resources knowledge and awareness, as well as actor strategies need to be taken into account.
This paper reports on the interim results of a research project aiming to depict the current status of GI usages in urban planning practice in Germany. The approach considers the formal relations of GI to organizations, instruments and procedures in planning ("application"), as well as the factual employment of GI by individual actors ("usage"). Key questions are, which type of applications are being deployed in practice, what exactly they are being used for, and how this usage is embedded in the processes of policy making and planning? In particular, local development paths for the identification, selection and shaping of usages will be examined, and the patterns of usage that emerge regarding cities across the country. Furthermore, possible effects on a) the quality of planning processes (efficiency, transparency, participation, etc.), and b) the quality of urban transformations in terms of sustainable development, will be assessed.
The paper will draw on the outcomes of an on-line survey among the 114 major cities in Germany (in cooperation with the German Association of Cities - DST), plus a literature review and a range of expert interviews. The expected empirical results will provide an important reference regarding the analysis of urban planning practices involving GI, and the concern for their cognitive, institutional and societal dimensions.

Providing Customized Base Maps in a SDI for Physical Planning (236)
Theodor Foerster, Jantien Stoter, International Institute for Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation, The Netherlands

A portal to make physical plans publicly available is currently established in the SDI of The Netherlands. The portal is called RO-online (RO stands for ruimtelijke ordening which means spatial planning) and aims at improving public governance as well as communication of future plans to citizens at municipal, regional and national level. Most of the communication related to physical plans is achieved by maps. In the new portal these maps are provided digitally and consist of a) the layer with plan objects and b) a topographical base layer for orientation provided by a topographic database. Consequently the plans are detached from their base map. However to guarantee a sufficient communication of the physical plans it is important that the provided base map is most optimally adjusted to the plan. This is the starting point to envision a process, in which the base map is created and disseminated according to the user requirements of querying the plans. To meet these user requirements automated generalization has been identified as the key approach. To generate and disseminate these optimal base maps for the plans on the web an architecture has been developed, which consists of the following components:
o The generalization-enabled mapping service, which provides the customized base maps by the means of generalization (OGC WMS)
o Web Processing Services for remote generalization processing (OGC WPS)
o A Web Map Client from which different users can access the physical plan with the customized base map.
All components are based on international standards from ISO and OGC. Thereby they are interoperable with other SDIs and initiatives in the future. The architecture that is designed and that will be presented in the paper makes use of the data services provided by RO-online and will enhance the portrayal of the physical plan by dynamically generating user-driven, customized base maps, as will be shown by examples in the paper.
The implemented architecture is based on software, which is available through Open Source license. The generalization system, which has been integrated into the WMS is 1Spatial's Clarity.
It is important to note, that this paper addresses future development perspectives and is currently not an active development branch of RO-online.

Geodatenkatalog-DE is a system for interdisciplinary metadata search. It first has been established in 2004 as part of GeoPortal.Bund, the Federal Geoportal in Germany. GeoPortal.Bund provides a search engine and a catalogue with a service interface. The metadata are coming from distributed catalogues. After a few further developments it is now the base for the new Geodatenkatalog-DE. This system is planned to be the central German metadata node for INSPIRE. The development is planned and controlled by the german SDI initiative, especially the working group on Geodatenkatalog-DE. The first step of the implementation was done within a GDI-DE pilot project and finished in April 2008.
The Geodatenkatalog-DE "crawls" the distributed catalogue services and builds a redundant data pool. One part of the data pool is indexed for a quick search. The complete, original xml-files are coming from the distributed catalogue services which are stored in a file system. They are used for the detail view. As there will be a huge amount of metadata sets, a ranking is essential and will be developed. Double datasets are deleted. More than one datasets with one unique UUID will be filtered to keep only the newest version (the latest datestamp). The result is a consolidated, efficient and high - performance data access for INSPIRE, GEOSS and the German SDI (see figure 1).
At present Geodatenkatalog-DE is crawling over six distributed metadata information systems. They describe spatial data sets about topography, environment, water, infrastructure, geology and farming (to be continued).
Geodatenkatalog-DE accesses catalogue interfaces which are conform with the OpenGIS® Catalogue Services Specification 2.0 - ISO19115/ISO19119 Application Profile for CSW 2.0 or the OpenGIS® Catalogue Services Specification 2.0.2 - ISO Metadata Application Profile.
Until May 2010 the project will be finished and the Geodatenkatalog-DE will also be connected to the present development of the INSPIRE Portal. Within the following phase of the pilot project it is planned to integrate all INSPIRE and SDI relevant metadata.

INSPIRE is the directive that enforces European Union member states to develop their own national spatial data infrastructures, in order to establish a European Spatial Information Infrastructure that delivers to the users integrated spatial information services. The first context where INSPIRE is going to be developed is environmental information.
The Water Framework Directive (WFD) is considered to be the most important piece of legislation in a new European water policy with an important environmental component. The WFD, although focused on hydrological objectives, poses problems in the field of data distribution and data access. European WFD information can be considered to be part of a distributed information system, since the different pieces of information are not centralized, but spread over the different competent authorities in charge of implementing the directive.
The most suitable approach to the WFD data access and diffusion problem is to base its solution on making interoperate services of different competent authorities and mapping agencies, that is, to take an SDI and INSPIRE approach. While fulfilling the requirement that WFD must be publicly distributed (water stakeholders, general public and other organizations, including the European Commission with their compliance checking needs), this approach takes advantage of accessing the necessary data online from their original sources. Additionally, several INSPIRE principles can be achieved: data is maintained at the level where this can be done most effectively (the river basin competent authorities); data is collected at one level of government and shared with other levels (data flows online from the competent authorities to the European Commission and other organizations through the member states); and it would be possible to combine seamlessly data from different river basin authorities and mapping agencies in different use cases and applications, such as providing a WFD compliance checking tool for the European Commission.
In this paper, the architecture, data, services and applications needed for a hydrological SDI are presented, together with the problems found and the solutions applied while developing the Ebro River Basin Authority SDI (IDE-Ebro) and the international geoportal for the SDIGER project (SDI for the Garonne and Ebro Rivers). Some use cases related to the WFD data distribution and access and related to the improvement of the administrative processes of the organization are also presented.

INSPIRE Coordinate Transformation Service - the Specification and experiences gained from a pilot implementation (243)
Janne Kovanen, Lassi Lehto, Finnish Geodetic Institute, Finland

The INSPIRE Directive recognizes Transformation Service as one of the five network service types essential for interoperable Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). Detailed instructions for implementing Transformation Services are being developed by the INSPIRE Network Services Drafting Team. These instructions are divided into two parts: the Implementing Rule and the Technical Guidance. The Implementing Rule specifies the Transformation Service in abstract terms and the first related Technical Guidance focuses only on the transformation category Coordinate Transformation Service.
Transformation Services can support Download Services and View Services to satisfy the requirements of an interoperable SDI, like the INSPIRE. In particular, Coordinate Transformation Services are essential in an environment, where spatial data are stored and viewed in multiple coordinate reference systems. The interface of the Coordinate Transformation Service must facilitate easy chaining with other services. This paper presents the developed service interface specification and describes an approach to implement it on the basis of Free and Open Source components. The interface is specified as an Application Profile (AP) of the Web Processing Service (WPS), which is an official OGC standard. A Coordinate Transformation Service instance is defined as a single WPS process conforming to this AP.
The interface incorporates the functionality of the mandatory operations of the Web Coordinate Transformation Service (WCTS) specification, which has been published as an OGC Discussion Paper. The main concepts of the interface are based on the WCTS's Transform operation. In addition, the interface makes use of the OGC Web Service's exception reporting mechanism to implement the WCTS's optional IsTransformable operation under the same AP. The specified Coordinate Transformation Service accepts Geography Markup Language (GML) encoded data as input. A given service implementation can handle various GML versions. However, the version of the output will be the same as for the input, as the service is not supposed to support schema transformations.
A pilot implementation of the service was developed at the Finnish Geodetic Institute using Open Source libraries as basis. For efficiency reasons the implementation uses a straightforward method of transforming the input coordinates point by point, ignoring the geometry elements. The only situation where geometry is taken into account is the special case of bounding boxes. Parsing of the input data is performed by using a SAX parser together with a few stack structures. The stacks are responsible for maintaining the transformations and the relevant GML elements. This creates a reasonably efficient and simple implementation. The output contains the same data content as the input, except that coordinate values have been transformed and the coordinate reference system identifiers have been changed to correspond to the target coordinate reference system.
The results of the work show that the interface specification is functional. The developed pilot service demonstrates one feasible approach for implementing a Coordinate Transformation Service in an SDI employing standardized interfaces.

Aquo-kit: harmonised toolkit for the water management reporting process in The Netherlands (245)
Jeroen Nijhuis, Witteveen+Bos, Hinne Reitsma, Niels Lammers, The Netherlands

Water management organisations in The Netherlands do have a fast growing need to effi-ciently exchange data and information, both spatial- and non-spatial, with each other and to external stakeholders. Regulations, laws, and lateral agreements together with the need to inter-operate in the water chain, are, amongst others, the cause of this.
In 2005 a National symposium in The Netherlands was organised where the need to harmonise the large amount of formal and informal tools and data stores was raised. In 2006 the Aquo-kit project group was formed to realise the required data infrastructure. The project group consists of the project leaders of the subsequent tools and the proposed standard in-cluding an overall project leader.
As a data exchange model the UM Aquo was chosen. UM Aquo is a GML based water standard, aiming at data exchange, and compatible with the NEN3610 standard. A cyclic development approach was defined where in four phases the product in 2010 should be finished and where each phase ends with an implemented and usable product.
In 2007 the Aquo-kit phase 1 was assigned to be the toolkit for the Dutch contribution to the EU Water framework directive especially to collect, exchange, judge, and report the large amount of data for the River Basin Management Plan 2009. In June 2008 phase 1 was suc-cessfully implemented and used by the water management organisations in the Netherlands.
Three key success factors of Aquo-kit phase 1 are identified:
(1) organisation: commitment from management, users, and suppliers through he whole chain. A project team that focused on the results and, important, guarded the scope of the project resisting the pressure to include extra functionality;
(2) information: (a) the UM Aquo standard with a clearly defined syntax and semantics us-able in the whole data exchange chain on all different abstraction levels. So for instance a single measurement on the pH value on a monitoring location as well as a judgement on the river basin as a whole for the physical-chemical parameter, are expressed within the same standardised language. (b) integration of both spatial and non-spatial information in GML/XML, and (c) a strong emphasise to have the domain lists with the instantiations of "permanent" (or slowly changing) data and their relations correct, complete, and via web services available (XML-scheme) to the stakeholders;
(3) technical: strong consistency and scheme validation checks together with an overall sys-tem architecture to clearly separate the concerns of each component in the Aquo-kit tool-kit. Each separation is established on one or more describing dimensions of a value (e.g. separation between physical-chemical and biological judgement components), the pur-pose of the data (i.e. monitoring data, judgements, norms, or describing dimensions and their interrelations), or on specific functionality (e.g. GML-editor).
We expect the lessons learned in this project to be valuable for equivalent (geo) data infra-structures both in the water domain as well as other domains.

Return of Investment: Guided by Interactive Location Based Systems (253)
Ron van Lammeren, Arend Ligtenberg, Hanneke Giffen, Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Interactive Location based services (ILBS) do offer many challenges to support communities and commodities. The Dutch DiWi, digital dowsing rod, project has made a reconnaissance of different options for interactive use, involvement of community members and the comparison with other technologies.
In this contribution this type of ILBS as a commodity is compared with other technologies (Davis, 1992, Maguire, 2008). The different components of such architecture will be used to give an overview of investments ad returns. An important variable to discuss in relation to the level of returns is the role of the community. The contribution of the community could heavily influence these returns (Kramer, 2006; Krug, 2005, Ligtenberg, 2008). For that purpose four community roles will be used as a framework to classify and discuss the types of contributions. The spatial-temporal contributions in detail, which means in this occasion of the particular DiWi setting, will be presented and discussed. This contribution will finally conclude upon each of the three topics and their mutual relations.

Key Register Subsurface (265)
Floris de Bree, Geological Survey of the Netherlands, The Netherlands

About five years ago the Dutch government initiated the programme Andere Overheid (translated: Change of governmental approach) to optimize governmental services. Within this programme the project called stroomlijning basisgegevens put focus on optimizing storage and supply of governmental key registers, because currently, there are about 30000 databases that contain public information, which is largely overlapping.
The main goal is to store data at the source, and to make it accessible using web services. For example; municipalities store information about civilians (e.g. first name, surname), the tax office can access this information on-the-fly by using web services.
Besides an increase in efficiency and effectiveness, it will also secure that if someone changes his name, it will automatically be updated at, in this case, the tax office.
The organisations that get the information through the web services, will be obliged to send a notice to the source if they doubt the correctness of the acquired information. These processes will be written down in a law, also mentioning time frames in which both organisations are obliged to act, to make sure that all parties know what they can expect from each other.
At the moment a number of key registers are in place or are being developed. These registrations contain information on persons, information on addresses and buildings, casdatral information, topographic information and others.
There is a large chance that the Dutch government will decide that key register subsurface shall be initiated before the end of this year (2008) as well.
Traditionally, the stakeholders of the subsurface were mainly active in the economical domain, for example oil, gas and salt mining activities. For that reason jurisdiction was mainly focused on the deep subsurface (below 500 meters). For a long time, a Dutch national mining law has been in place, mentioning how to deal with resources from the deep subsurface. This law has currently been updated and is known for its transparency for both public and private parties.
At TNO DINO, we notice that the interest in the shallow subsurface (0-500 meters) is currently increasing strongly. From different ministries stakeholders approach TNO to sustainably store and supply their data. For a long time we store data about groundwater, boreholes, seismology, geology, minerals and others. Increasingly, we also store information on soil contamination, spatial planning, infrastructural information, CO2 storage and many others.
Therefore, together with the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment and Alterra, the organization that traditionally stores information of up to 1,20 meters below surface, we started to increase awareness about the benefits of the key register Subsurface.
This paper will partially discuss the key registers in general, it will mainly focus on the key register subsurface.

CartoCiudad is an official cartographic Data Base of the Spanish cities and villages and their streets and roads networks topologically structured, with spatial continuity all over Spain. This project, which has vocation of becoming the streets official Database of the National Government of Spain, is the result of harmonization and integration of official digital cartography and information produced by the main suppliers of Geographical Information in Spain: General Directorate of Cadastre, Statistical Office, Postal Office and General Directorate of the National Geographic Institute.
Between 2008 and 2009, CartoCiudad has progressed in three directions: Increasing the production of new cartography, Defining a updating methodology, Improving and increasing its web services
Production: The production planning of CartoCiudad has been defined for 4 years, starting in 2006. Currently the available data are 1564 municipalities, which means the 68% of Spanish population. Between 2008 and 2009 almost the whole population will be covered.
Updating: The maintenance and management of the new integrated data require the modification of the data model that allows controlling both the life cycle of each element and its state (current, historic, etc.).
With the adoption of the life cycle, an element of the real world is represented in the database through several records with a unique identifier, so that all the changes suffered by each element can be managed.
New Web Services: www.cartociudad.es
CartoCiudad has been designed so that users can access its data through Standard Web Services (OGC), via Internet (www.cartociudad.es). So far, there have been developed next services:
o Web Map Service (WMS), to visualize data and navigate all over territory.
o Gazetteer, based on WFS specification, to locate postal addresses (thoroughfare name + house number) or locations defined by a road and a kilometric point. It also allows locating other entities: regions, provinces, municipalities, postal codes and census districts and sections.
o Web Processing Service (WPS), with two functionalities:
o Routes calculation between two points throughout Spain.
o Proximity calculation:maximum areas to look of interest points inside it
During 2008, new services has been developed as the Geographical Coordinates Translation to Postal Addresses (GC2PA),, which allows obtaining postal addresses from geographical coordinates through a XML query. This service is already available,
Another new utility of CartoCiudad is a web client called CartoVisor to be embedded in a particular web. With this client, any kind of organization can create its own interest points layer and as well as include a customized client in its own web.
CartoCiudad web was published in February 2008, being permanently improved both the requirements response time and the services: it has been implemented Tile Cache technology, reinforcing the computer infrastructure to provide a faster and more efficient public service. It is also being constantly improved the usability of the web, as well as new functionalities using both mouse buttons and tooltips to give additional and useful information to the users.
In 2009, the effort related to CartoCiudad exploitation services, will be focus on two main objectives:
o Increasing the user-system interoperability (intelligent ordering of results, dynamic zoom while completing transactions, etc.)
o Increasing the add value chain with new services based on CartoCiudad SDI.
CartoCiudad-INSPIRE: CartoCiudad project has been the reference project about Spanish Postal Addresses System taking into account in the definition of INPIRE Data Specification of Addresses. Therefore, its data model complies with the specification draft defined so far.
Moreover, CartoCiudad is one of the best practices which are been analysed within the "European Addresses Infrastructure" (EURADIN) project, as the National Geographic Institute of Spain takes part through this project.

Implementing WPS as an Coordinate Transformation Service (269)
Tomasz Kubik, Institute of Computer Engineering, Control and Robotics, Wroclaw University of Technology, Bartosz Kopanczyk, Poland

One of the SDI components whose potential is not fully utilized yet is WPS (Web Processing Service) - standard released by OGC. This service provides an interface that can be used as a facade to the interfaces of the other services already defined or to the services which are planned but not specified yet. More over, WPS service is well suited for process chaining - the strategy used in GIS analysis, where the final objective is achieved as a result of a series of processing steps.
According to the ISO 19119 geographic services taxonomy there might be several categories of processing services which modifies the properties of features. One of the categories distinguished in the ISO 19119 is coordinate transformation service. This service is used to change coordinates from a coordinate reference system based on one datum to a coordinate reference system based on a second datum.
To have the coordinate transformation service available as a component of the NSDI is highly appreciated in Poland. According to the regulation of the Council of Ministers of Poland from 2000 regarding the national reference frame all local authorities should transform their spatial data represented in the coordinate system "1965" into the new system "2000" until the end of 2009. It is evident that the results of this conversion would be more consistent if all authorities could use the same common processing service. This is a good opportunity for WPS implementation to come into play.
In our earlier work we described the idea of employing WPS as a set of image processing algorithms, settled at one place reachable from the internet. The proposition was illustrated with the WPS 0.4.0 version implementation. In the current paper we present the redesigned implementation of the service conforming the WPS 1.0.0 version specification. The implementation is written in C# language and is based on MS WebService technology. More details are given in the paper, along with examples.

Although there is not an agreed definition for the term System of Systems (SoS), the systems research community has been using it for the last few decades to refer to geographically distributed but interconnected autonomous systems, which include heterogeneous components, and show emerging behaviours, possibly unexpected, not possible before the SoS was established (Maier 1996).
In our work, we will present a comparative analysis of SoS and Information Infrastructures (IIs). This analysis will lead us to propose that, although these two terms are generally used in different research communities, IIs are a type of SoS with certain specific characteristics: their enabling nature, their focus on information and their dependence on an installed base. As the relationship between SDIs and IIs has been established in the literature almost since the conception of SDIs, we will conclude that SDIs can be modelled under the framework provided by SoS. This relationship has already been pointed out by some SDI proposals, although its consequences have not been developed (Atkinson & Box 2008).
Systems of Systems Engineering (SoSE), and Architecting (SoSA), are two disciplines that can provide techniques and solutions applicable to SDI modelling. We will review the SoS literature to find and propose some of the solutions adopted for SoS that could be applicable to SDIs.
Finally we will employ software systems engineering tools, e.g. the International Organization for Standardization Open Distributed Processing Reference Model (ISO RM-ODP), to address the modelling of SDIs under the SoS point of view. We will propose a model of SDIs that includes their high-level components as interconnected systems that form an SoS. These components will include organizations which participate in the SDI, the resources they contribute, e.g. people, services etc., and the rules and policies that regulate their behaviours.
Atkinson, R. & Box, P. (2008) United Nations Spatial Data Infrastructure (UNSDI) Proposed Technical Governance Framework. United Nations Geographic Information Working Group.
Maier, M.W. (1996) Architecting Principles for Systems-of-Systems. 6th Annual International Symposium of INCOSE. págs. 567-574. Boston, MA, USA.

In the late 2008, several new services of the State Geodetic Administration have been launched and have become available to the users. This refers to the Croatian positional system of permanent GNSS stations named "CROPOS" and the State Geodetic Administration (SGA) geo-portal whose first stage of development enables the use of five datasets and adequate meta service.
The development of these services and the preparations related to their launching have been very in-depth and comprehensive. In order to provide the seamless functioning of these two services, the SGA has created a completely new and powerful data centre, carried out several system tests before launching them and defined a new visual identity of all SGA products and thus the institution itself in order to make them more recognizable to the users.
All the afore-mentioned activities are also directly linked to the establishment and development of the SDI in Croatia because these services are the SDI tools and we expect them to significantly contribute to a faster development of the national SDI. Therefore, the SGA has paid special attention to informing the SDI subjects and potential users of the new services, their capabilities and manners of use. For that purpose, the monitoring of the services to provide information significant for further development of such services and the work of the national SDI bodies have intensified.
In that context, CROPOS is of particular importance for the implementation of the new geodetic referential framework of the Republic of Croatia whose practical implementation begins in 2010 and leans heavily on the work of CROPOS. The importance of the geo-portal is significant for the implementation of the concepts of easy and efficient accessibility and exchange of digital geo-data between the subjects and users of the data, which is the goal of any SDI, regardless of whether it is at the regional, national or European level, as stipulated by the INSIPRE Directive.
The paper describes these two systems, early actions carried out by the SGA in order to create optimal conditions for their functioning and the role of the services in a wider context of the national SDI development.

Developing a Harmonized Geographic Data Model for Turkey Following Inspire Data Specifications (277)
Arif Cagdas Aydinoglu, Karadeniz Technical University, Turkey, Wilko Quak, The Netherlands

Directive 2007/2/EC for establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) entered into force on the 15th May 2007. INSPIRE is trying to establish the Implementing Rules for metadata, network services, data specifications, data and service sharing, and monitoring and reporting with extensive stakeholder participation. The INSPIRE Data Specifications Drafting Team has finalized the framework documents for the specification development process and is now preparing application schemas for spatial data themes to determine geographic data standards of European Union countries. Turkey, as a candidate country for entering European Union, aims to follow the INSPIRE initiative in her National GIS actions. In this study, the development process of geographic data standard was examined with a local practice from Turkey as a case of East European countries. While developing a new generation of data model, INSPIRE data specifications and methodology were followed. This model manages and delivers geospatial framework (and other) data in meaningful packets of information, with unique and persistent identifiers that support association and aggregation. More importantly the model help shift the paradigm in terms of data linking, sharing and reuse and assist in the move towards mainstream GI take up. This can be a harmonized base model and a starting point for spatial data providers in Turkey. In this paper we describe the steps needed in the development of a harmonized data specification for Turkey using the methodology for the development of data specifications (D2.6). Data Harmonization Components are determined according to Data Specification Conceptual Model (D2.5). These include principles, reference model, application schema rules, general feature model, spatial object identifier, spatial object versioning, etc. Draft Data Specifications are developed for Turkey before determining consolidated registers of INSPIRE. In this paper we report on the challenges encountered using the INSPIRE approach to standardization of data. Barriers and methods for sharing data are indicated.

Cyberinfrastructure for global water quality and biogeochemical data of inland and coastal waters: Status, challenges, opportunities (282)
Emilio Mayorga, University of Washington, Anthony Aufdenkampe, USA

Human pressures on coastal and inland waters are increasing rapidly worldwide, threatening the integrity of these ecosystems and the essential services they provide. Threats and perturbations include alterations of water flow regimes, fragmentation of river courses, nutrient and pollutant emission, coastal eutrophication and oxygen depletion, habitat degradation, and climate change. Throughout the developing world, access to clean water and healthy aquatic ecosystems remain critical limitations to public health. Addressing these challenges and assessing our progress and the effectiveness of different management actions require extensive, multi-scale, coherent, sustained and timely monitoring of ecosystem health and water quality and quantity, as well as increased scientific understanding of ecosystem functioning.
Existing systems for water monitoring and historical data archival are increasingly recognized as being poorly integrated and inadequate for the present challenges. Yet, the sensor technology, computing capacity, network connectivity, numerical modeling, and informatics architectures that have emerged in the last two decades provide fundamentally new opportunities for research, monitoring and assessment, and broad access to data about the environment, ecosystem health and the impact of human actions. The development of networked sensor observatories (e.g., NEON, GOOS) represents an exciting integration of these technological advances, but they are unlikely to replace traditional, wide-coverage monitoring programs, wet-lab analysis of powerful but less common geochemical parameters, monitoring in developing countries, characterization of long-term trends. At the same time, water quality and biogeochemical data collected by investigators often remain fragmented in publications and cannot be merged easily and seamlessly with data from government monitoring programs; few incentives and options exist for effectively documenting and depositing data in common, recognized, usable and open data resource archives. Government monitoring programs in the U.S. fall under multiple jurisdictions, while at the international level, the primary inland water quality database (UNEP GEMS-Water program) provides limited coverage and scope, has access restrictions and redundancy with other governmental databases, and provides limited incentives for contributions by scientific investigators. Moreover, integration of river observations with consistent river networks and watershed properties is often limited.
This overall fragmentation is a significant impediment to progress on validation, comparison, and improvement of water quality and aquatic biogeochemical models across regions and time scales, including the impact of human pressures and climate change on lakes, rivers and estuaries; it limits our ability to construct reliable, well-documented, regionally resolved trends in constituent fluxes to the coast across the world; and limits the robustness and inter-comparability of water quality assessments across large regions and countries. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of prominent, existing water quality data resources and monitoring, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. We will also describe several promising developments and opportunities for integration of data across jurisdictions, and between investigator-led and government-led monitoring programs. We will draw from relevant, successful data infrastructure efforts that can serve as guides for the incremental development of an infrastructure for global water quality and biogeochemical data, including their critical geospatial dimensions.

One of the principal requirements for the establishment of a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is to rely on metadata enabling discovery, access and assessment of available geographic information. The European GI producers have identified the need of providing and managing GI metadata; this is one of the outcomes of a survey carried out by INSPIRE initiative aimed at finding out the present-day availability and characteristics of metadata. However, its generation is not well developed.
Within the scope of metadata, the Spatial Data Infrastructure of Spain (IDEE) has begun to define a strategy to promote metadata creation. This strategy is based on the definition of Plans of Action carrying out by the National Geographic Institute from Spain in collaboration with the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). These Plans are created for the purpose of raising awareness about metadata promotion and creation inside State General Administration (AGE) from Spain. These Plans provide a technical assistance to the institutions at the initial stages of their geographic information cataloguing and to contribute subsequently to metadata publishing in the IDEE metadata catalogue. For each organization a specific Plan of Action is designed by metadata experts taking into account all the different aspects are part of the cataloguing process and according to the type of information provided by the organization. Additionally, a metadata training course is carried out, and then a process of metadata creation is carried out by both the institutional staff and the group of metadata experts. Thanks to these plans the organizations may be able to begin to create metadata and independently to continue with the geographic information cataloguing process.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the methodology used for the design and execution of the metadata Plan of Action, to describe the results obtained from its implementation in different Spanish organizations being part of IDEE and to discuss the different aspects to be taken into account in metadata creation.
The paper is arranged as follows: first the general methodology for the development of the Action Planning is described, then the results obtained from a specific plan carried out at the Spanish Oceanography Institute are presented. Further the whole experience and lessons learnt are described. Finally, a overall summary and conclusions arised from the work done are presented.

VESTA-GIS: Survey and on-line tools to support GI&GIS vocational education and training offer (290)
Milva Carbonaro, GISIG - Geographical Information Systems International Group, Italy, Anders Ostman, Sweden, Emanuele Roccatagliata, Italy

VESTA-GIS (Vocational Education and Sectoral Training Network on GIS & GI Application domains), is a Leonardo Network (project no. 2007-1989) promoted within the EC Lifelong Learning Programme with the aim to create a pool of knowledge in the GIS domain (both technology and sectoral application), to share experience and foster innovation in vocational training, to identify the trends and skills requirements in this area and to improve the anticipated benefit of vocational training initiatives.
The main outcome of VESTA-GIS is the creation of an open training network, developed in the framework established by the European Directives for environment and territory and in particular with the aspects related to the implementation of the INSPIRE Directive (EC/2007/2).
The following main activities are foreseen within VESTA-GIS:
- network building and sharing knowledge
- analysis of training content offer and demand
- implementation of the network training framework and of an e-learning platform
- training course catalogue building
- promotion of people mobility
- exploitation and dissemination actions
The Network is developed with particular emphasis to the involvement of the GI users. In this perspective, the network will be addressed other than to the GI technologies to their application domains, starting initially with 1)Water Resources Management, 2)Natural Environment Protection, 3)Coastal Management and Landscape.
One of the first activities of VESTA-GIS has been the assessment of training needs within the VESTA-GIS target groups, the resulting requirements for professional skills and the evaluation of the training market situation and its key issues at a European level. To achieve these goals a survey was carried out among the stakeholders of market in geo-information. The survey was implemented via two online questionnaires, addressing the demand and the supply sides of the GI-training and education market, validated and confirmed by subsequent qualitative interviews. The obtained results were intended to help to produce a feasible structure for the description and validation of courses to be included in the VESTA-GIS training catalogue.
The paper illustrates the results of the survey and the first achievement related to the implementation of the two mail parallel VESTA-GIS objective streams, namely:
- Training Framework for GI courses, aimed to collect, organise and deliver vocational training content on the GIS technology and tools as well as on their application areas. This is achieved through a training catalogue and a distributed e-Learning platform, where training contents are accessible to trainees. In fact, together with a heterogeneous vocational education market lacking standardized offers and certifications, it is difficult for employees to find adequate offers of vocational GI-education. VESTA-GIS tries to improve this situation by establishing a multilingual course catalogue combined with a training package builder to assist people in finding the right educational offer tailored to their individual needs
- Mobility Framework, aimed to establish common procedures and a favourable framework to promote mobility of people among participating organisations and users, also through the organisation of an on-line database of placement requests and offers

NATURE-SDIplus: Best Practice Network for SDI in Nature Conservation (291)
Emanuele Roccatagliata, Giorgio Saio, GISIG - Geographical Information Systems International Group, Italy

The establishment of Natura2000 and the new EU approach for protected sites management has reinforced the link between nature conservation and geo-information. This has generated in the Community of nature stakeholders the need for easily accessible, interoperable and harmonised datasets. Such link is also addressed by the INSPIRE Directive which pursues an EU Spatial Data Infrastructure to support environmental policy and management.
The Nature-SDIplus Network (eContentplus project no. ECP-2007-317007) aims, through state-of-the-art methodologies and technologies, as well as with best practice examples, to improve harmonisation of national-created datasets and make them more accessible and then exploitable. Therefore, it contributes to the INSPIRE implementation with specific reference to a cluster of data themes on nature conservation (as per the INSPIRE Annexes):
- Protected sites (Annex I)
- Biogeographical regions, Habitats and biotopes, Species distribution (Annex III)
The main objectives of the Nature-SDIplus Network are to: involve new stakeholders; share data and best practice; improve and stimulate exploitation and an effective re-use of information on nature conservation.
The project analyses the availability, usability and accessibility of data against the needs of users. The results of the analysis, to be done also on representative data-sets provided by the partners from many EU Member States, will be used to develop a European metadata profile based on ISO 19115/119 standards and data model in CEN/TC287 Geographic Information. The profile will be for evaluation and use and will start from the INSPIRE metadata profile for discovery. It will be compliant with the INSPIRE Directive, and data model. It will be done in coordination with CEN/TC287.
The project will define a common multilingual and multicultural approach for a simpler and standard access to spatial data. A demonstration infrastructure based on an architecture compliant with the INSPIRE principle and supported by web services, will provide data accessibility for the different stakeholders. A dedicated geo-portal (NATURE-SDIplus geo-portal) will be the main door to access the available datasets and services, offering a means to actively engage the stakeholders.
Supported by networking activities, a Nature-SDIplus Community will be established to address the relevant themes with a consensus building approach. The Community will also demonstrate the effectiveness of the Nature-GIS thematic SDIC already registered with INSPIRE. The project will, through training and dissemination, ensure that widespread awareness is achieved.
The paper aims to illustrate the results of the project first phase, particularly with regard to the survey of target user-needs carried out in collaboration with data providers/national coordinators, done to structure their actual needs in terms of data harmonisation and accessibility, as input to the technical activities.
Moreover will be presented the results of the activity for the INSPIRE Data Specification Testing done with reference to Protected Sites (a Spatial Data Theme of INSPIRE Annex I)

Bending the Web to Suit Your Maps (292)
Arnulf Christl, WhereGroup, Germany

This presentation shows how maps and spatial data tie into the emerging programmable web. To demonstrate the issues in question the presentation will visit several online portals and applications based on geospatial data infrastructures. Two general aspects of the Web will help to get us on the way, one is technical the other organizational.
We first have to recognize and appreciate that we already have a working global data communications system, the internet. No matter what we do - this will be the foundation on which the global spatial data infrastructure lives. The internet is made up of the Transfer Control Protocol and more explicitly the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). It is the basis for all communication, collaboration, data exchange and increasingly also processing taking place on all connected nodes. The most prominent protocols on this transport layer are HTTP to connect resources and making them addressable and SMTP for Email communication. Enhanced with TLS (the successor of SSL) and encrypted with PGP this network can be made as secure as it will ever be. Many SDI architecture diagrams implementing "SOA" principles depict a central element called "Service Bus". In an enterprise it is frequently prefixed as in "Enterprise Service Bus". Following this logic the global instance of a SOA would be prefixed "Global Service Bus". As we have just seen the "Global Service Bus" is the Web itself which renders the whole concept of the SOA somewhat useless. This confusion has its roots at the organizational level which brings us to the other aspect of the Web.
The Web lives on top of TCP/IP (the internet) and its application protocols. It is inhabited by real world people, a most interesting aspect of the Web when looking at how to leverage it as a spatial data infrastructure. The three types of Web inhabitants are individuals, crowds and communties. The only ones who can actually do something are individuals. Crowds are groups of individuals who simply do more or less the same thing without needing a top-down organization. Crowds can create massive amounts of information and data as can be seen in OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. Communities have the potential to span several crowds and give an organized access layer to them. One example in the spatial realm is OSGeo. It is important to keep in mind that neither communities nor crowds can be "created" from the top but they need to grow from the bottom. This does not mean that we cannot leverage them to pursue organizational and even commercial goals, but we need to learn how to operate and interact with this crowd source, no matter whether we are at the level of GSDI, INSPIRE, GeoNovum, GDI-DE or local SDIs.
We simply have to learn how to use the Web and interact with its inhabitants from an organizational point of view that carries a legacy of decrepit legislations, licenses and all kinds of proprietary interests that are simply alien to how the Web really works.

This paper stresses the importance of promoting the dissemination of the Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) in the context of the Compulsory Secondary Education and their utilization as an ICT educational resource being able to contribute to the development of "digital competence".
This work is based on the Spanish Law of Education (Ley Orgánica de Educación 7899 2/2006 of May 3, 2006) whereby the minimum teaching for the Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) in Spain is established, which, following the recommendations of the European Union, places the "digital competence" for the first time among the eight basic competences that must be developed during the compulsory education.
Considering that "the digital competence" implies use of the ICT for work, leisure and communication, and that the SDI represent an ICT, the question comes up whether knowledge and use of the SDI as an ICT educational resource may contribute to the advancement of "digital competence".
To answer that question:
a. The essential knowledge, capacity and attitude related to "digital competence" are identified.
b. The ESO subjects addressing geographic information related contents are considered.
c. Common basic contents of every subject are identified that could be addressed using SDI as an ICT educational resource, utilizing tools and services provided by the geoportals of the Spanish SDI initiatives.
d. Whether the understanding of those contents improve with the use of the SDI is analyzed.
e. Relationships are established between specific uses of SDI and contents of the subjects related to geographic information and the possibilities that those uses offer in the development of "digital competence".
f. The established relationships are analyzed and conclusions drawn.

The increased ability to handle large quantities of spatial information as a result of technological evolution and the increased power to access to this information due to the development of the Internet and the WWW has given a new breath to the development of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). At the same time the recognition that better information is needed to support environmental policies considering the existing diversity across regions conducted to the preparation and aproval of INSPIRE directive aiming to establish an SDI in the Community. INSPIRE aims to deal with complex issues that shape the situation in Europe, such as the lack of co-ordination across boarders and between levels of government, the incompatible information and systems, the fragmentation, redundancy and difficult integration of existing data as well as the diversified data policies.
The directive lays down general rules to establish the European SDI that will be based on the infrastructures established and operated by the Member States. Specific implementation rules (IR) defining the technical specifications required to implement SDI components are being developed. The development of geowebservices is one of the relevant components of SDI.
Services required by the Directive need to be conforming to the INSPIRE network services IR. For these services interoperability is requested, necessary for sharing spatial data between the various levels of public authority in the Community and the public. Open-source tools implement OGC Web Service specifications allowing establishing interoperability between systems from different vendors or data providers, with different GIS technologies.
IGP is the coordinator of the national SDI, SNIG, and is investing in the development of geowebservices using open-source tools to disseminate its datasets at SNIG (e.g. national administrative boundaries, digital terrain model, forest fires risk maps). A tool to allow the visualization of datasets through SNIG was also developed using open-source tools. INSPIRE directive covers several dataset themes, representing relevant environmental issues that are produced by different public authorities. In this context, the efforts to make Protected Areas information available through SNIG, based on INSPIRE orientations and on the experience of some EU projects, such as HUMBOLDT and Nature_SDIplus, were IGP is involved in association with the Nature Conservation agency (ICNB) are discussed herein. A case study in the North of Portugal, in the Montesinho Natural Park, is presented to illustrate the access to the data on Protected Sites through the national SDI. Montesinho Natural Park includes a variety of habitats that support a rich diversity of flora and fauna (e.g. wolf population). For this case study, metadata according to ISO 19119 was created and is already available trough SNIG catalogue. Contributions to the Protected Sites data model being discussed within the referred EU projects and the issues around the development of geowebservices using open-source tools (e.g. MapServer) are also included. Future issues concern the creation of a use case involving Montesinho Natural Park and the protected area in Spain, the Natura 2000 site "Sierra de la Culebra", to explore the transboundary issues associated to the use of GI for nature conservation.

Geographic Data supports decision making in various application areas from land administration and planning to environment and agriculture. Developing Geo-ICT technologies have resulted in increasing the use of digital geographic data. While early Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were largely designed to serve specific projects or user communities, Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) encompasses policies, technologies, human resources for the effective collection, management, access of GI to stimulate better governance, and to foster environmental sustainability by reducing duplication and facilitating integration at different administrative levels and across different sectors. To make a land administration system socially credible and functional, land-related information should be registered and structured at a detailed spatial level, such as the parcel and address level. In Turkey, there is not yet an integrated structure to manage key registers -parcel, address, building, and citizenship data in a harmonized way and no standardized approach to cope with application-driven requirements of public institutions. For example; the Interior Ministry is in the process to combine the databases of National Address Database (UAVT) and National Citizenship System (MERNIS). And, also Building Following System is being built to work with these systems under responsibility of municipalities. Land Registry and Cadastre Information System (TAKBS) are in the process to be built in all cadastre directorates of Turkey. In addition to this, GIS projects executed in local governments, LRCD, municipalities, and public institutions were not designed to enable data interoperability because they use different conceptual models and feature catalogs. In this study, the importance and use of registers in a harmonized way is examined. Standardization needs are determined as for example in the domain model for Land Administration and illustrated with the example of the Netherlands' key registers. Legal status and current projects for key registers of Turkey are analyzed. Opportunities and constraints to develop geographic data models are determined and explained with case studies.

European Address Infrastructure: EURADIN Project (311)
Maria Cabello, Isabel Goñi, Trabajos Catastrales S.A. (Tracasa), Andres Valentin, Spain

EURADIN (EURopean ADdress INfrastructure) aims at constituting a Best Practice Network to promote the European Addresses harmonization. The emphasis will be put in defining how access to existing address data should be made to ensure the interoperability of existing address data and working out a strategy on how to build up access services to national or regional addresses infrastructures.
At the first phase, a preliminary diagnostic has been performed in order to know the actual situation of address systems among the members of EURADIN project and to facilitate further studies during the project. We have also prepared a draft guide for increasing the diagnostic including in the future other European organizations.
Furthermore, we have defined the strategy for identifying Best Practises developed by the partners or coming from other organizations, which could be incorporated to the Best Practices Network that it is one of the aims of the project
The state-of-the-art includes, as well, a user requirements analysis (public and private sector), which will allow proposing the essential specifications to achieve the harmonization for European Address access taking into account INSPIRE requirements and specifications. The objective is cover up specifications regarding Data and Metadata and a proposal for Data flow and Business model.
We have received 41 different forms completed by the partners, analysing only 32 that have been defined by the partners as Address System among which 25 define themselves as presenting whole coverage either as national, regional or local scope. The updating of data is performed continuously in most systems
Regarding metadata, the metadata availability is one of the most relevant factors that devote Inspire Directive in order to analyse the situation of address systems in Europe. The first results indicate that less than 50% of the studied systems present metadata, which involves an important improving aspect in the different systems. However, among those presenting metadata, the majority are conform with ISO 19115 and Dublin Core and are presented using XML format
The available data flow functionality presented by the partners includes different steps; highlighting the high number of systems that also includes incidence control and those offering services, although their limited interoperability level.
Finally, regarding Business model and its social and economical benefits, we have to point out the assorted address uses among the different users, implemented in different tools that cover the needs not only from public but also from private sectors. We underline the use for geographical location, followed by risk control and accidents and health assistance.
To conclude it is worth mentioning that the Project is working from its beginnings supporting the Thematic Working Group in Addresses which goal is propose address data specifications in the ISNPIRE framework. The collaboration includes several meetings together and participation at different levels for Testing Validating INSPIRE specification proposal regarding addresses; for this purpose, EURADIN has been also register as SDIC.
We intend not only provide data and metadata for the testing, but also perform an analysis to evaluate the cost for transforming the existing address information to be provided according the new interoperable INSPIRE specifications. Nowadays, several partners are comparing the UML data model with the draft proposed by INSPIRE team.
The project main result will be the proposal for the European addresses Infrastructure and the implementation, testing, and validation of a pilot European Addresses Infrastructure. The results shall be used as a reference for all European Member States to fulfil the INSPIRE recommendations with respect to addresses.

Collaborative Working Environment for Building of Spatial Applications (313)
Karel Charvat, Petr Horak, Martin Vlk, Wirelessinfo, Czech Republic

This paper describes methodology developed by WirelessInfo partner in C@R project for collaborative development of geospatial Web based application. The solution is based on bus solution, where single components are registered and could be reused by other developers. This methodology is important mainly in applications, where are integrated spatial and non spatial application. In spatial world usually only Open Geospatial Consortium Web services are used. In the case of interaction with non geospatial application, there is requirement for interfaces based on SOA architecture. Reuse of geospatial components by non geospatial developers extends possibility of future applications.

Testing the INSPIRE Implementing Rule specification GIS4EU results (314)
Stefania De Zorzi, Corila, Carmelo Attardo, Italy

At the data submission (November 2006) of the GIS4EU project idea, to the European Commission, the Inspire implementing rules were not be available. But the major focus of this project was to provide a GIS4EU Data providers' datasets with a common data model.
The INSPIRE Data Model was provide at the end of 2008 and in order to identify the subset of features and attributes that will fore come by GIS4EU data sets (project 51 datasets analysed) aout 3 of the Annexes I themes: administrative units, transport networks and hydrography.
The objective of this paper is to identify the relationship of GIS4EU datasets to INSPIRE data models developed by INSPIRE Thematic Working Groups (TWGs). The comparison of the data models is done at a conceptual level and sub sequentially at physical model.
The goals of the comparative analysis are:
- Identify the subset of the INSPIRE data model and feature catalogue that can be completed by GIS4EU datasets.
- Propose new features to the INSPIRE data model, if some new ones are identified according to INSPIRE context, using a bottom up approach.
- Find out the problems that may arise at this step of the harmonization process.
The analysis has been obtained performing a matching between each GIS4EU dataset and the INSPIRE Data model.
Furthermore, a critical analysis of INSPIRE Data Model and harmonisation process has been carried out aiming to identify possible elements missed in INSPIRE data model. Results and conclusions derived from mentioned analysis are reported by GIS4EU project (INSPIRE LMO) during the INSPIRE Testing Phase.

Harmonizing Disparate Data with Spatial ETL (316)
Don Murray, Safe Software Inc., Canada

One of the key challenges organizations face in participating in a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) initiative is how to efficiently get their data into the required data model so they can support the diverse needs of different user communities. This presentation examines how server-based spatial ETL technology can be used to facilitate efficient data exchange between SDI participants. We'll discuss how the non-invasive data approach of server-based spatial ETL can eliminate the often expensive and time-consuming task of manipulating and integrating data into a common data model and schema. With spatial ETL, data harmonization is very straightforward. Data contributors simply make their spatial data available to a spatial ETL server where it is automatically restructured into the community-accepted data model and then presented on-the-fly based on individual users' requests. This flexible approach makes it much easier for organizations to contribute data as they don't need to create copies of their data and they don't need to modify the way that they work. From a data consumer standpoint, this approach also ensures that data users have access to the most current data possible - streamed via the web or available for self-service download. To illustrate best practices for data harmonization, this presentation will include a series of demonstrations that illustrate how data can be uploaded and validated right over the web, as well as shared through popular web applications like OGC web services, Google Earth/Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and OpenLayers. We'll also highlight how organizations can easily consume the growing number of web services within a server-based spatial ETL environment, making the process of integrating local and remote data sources within an SDI more efficient.

Geohosting: Publish Your Spatial Data Yourself (322)
Karel Charvat, Petr Horak, Martin Vlk, Wirelessinfo, Czech Republic

Last years, there is discussed so called Spatial Data Infrastructure. This SDI is discussed on European Level (INSPIRE), on national levels, but also World Wide (UN SDI). There exist technological solutions, but this solution is in many cases not available for small data providers or for organization, which don't have their own servers. There exist possibility to use Google technology, but this Google technology doesn't fulfill requirements of SDI building. This paper describes so called Geogosting technology, based in rules for INSPITE and UN SDI and OGC standards. There are describe three basic models: use free - publish free, out source your data services, use your own solution

A number of 3D geo-browsers, both open source as well as part of proprietary GIS enterprise solutions, are used during the daily practice to access to geospatial data, available within SDIs, via OGC-compliant web-services. However simple data access is not sufficient for complex tasks such as those required for planning or management of environmental resources. These tasks in fact often require the availability of geo-processing functionalities of various type for statistical, analytical or geographical functionalities. These processes, although typical of standard GIS solutions, are not available within web based 3D geobrowsers.
The work illustrated within this paper has brought to the development of a 3D geobrowser, based on Open Source technologies, which can be used to access interactively geospatial information available within the SDIs. Additionally the application can also be used to access processing services exposed through the network in an interoperable form and made available within the SDI as Web Processing Services (WPS).
When the user connects to the remote computer exposing the WPS services, the client automatically populates its graphical user interface with building blocks representing the processing services available. The user can then interactively select processing units from the menu and he/she can drag and drop them within the 3D scene. Each component, representing a processing service, is rendered as a placemark illustrating its functions. Further each component has a number of input and output slots. These represent the data type(s) accepted by the process as input and the result(s) produced as output.
A symbol, rendered on top of them, informs the user about the data type accepted (e.g. shape file, numerical value, image etc.). The user can then connect compatible in- and out-slots to create complex process chains directly within the 3D scene. To do so the user drags a data slot close to a compatible connector until the system links them.
This way the user can orchestrate available processing services to create complex process chains in a very user-friendly manner. Existing connections can be also broken to and re-arranged to the accommodate for the various user needs. The user can also provide the information required as input via direct user feedback, for instance drawing with the mouse an area over the terrain and connecting it to a specific input slot. The latter example is typically necessary when the user needs to select an area to define a filtering region.
After the process chain is created the user can activate the process sequence. This operation is performed at the server level asynchronously. Therefore the user can continue with his/her tasks without experiencing interruptions or decrease in performance. The result of the process is then returned to the user within the 3D web client application and made visible within the 3D scene.
The paper will eventually show the example of a complex analysis within a real data set and it will discuss major benefits and limitations of the approach proposed.

DIGMAP project: achieved results and future initiatives applied to SDI (342)
Miguel Ángel Bernabé, Mabel Álvarez, Alberto Fernández Wyttenbach, Willington Siabato, Technical University of Madrid, Spain

Discovering our Past World with Digitised Maps "DIGMAP" was a project co-funded by community programme eContentplus and developed from October 2006 to September 2008. The project has been developed by seven partners from six European countries and has developed solutions for georeferenced digital libraries, especially focused on historical resources such as ancient maps and other related documents. The final results consist of a group of portals which offer different kinds of services for resource discovery and other related services. These results will be a huge collaborative framework between multidisciplinary institutions that will help to integrate historical resources all over the world.
This paper describes the main aspects to be highlighted in regard to the way covered during the execution of the project and, the new initiatives carried out to assure the sustainability of the results achieved until now. Possible new applications, dissemination of the technology and other next steps are also discussed. This paper is divided in four parts: the first one shows a general overview of the project, including the main results. The second part is about awareness and dissemination, and interaction with other projects. The third part describes briefly the tools that have been developed during the last two years and how these tools could be useful for SDI, geoportals and others. Finally, the article shows how results are being applied in new projects, policies and multiple institutions and consortiums.

National Topographic Database Software (345)
Masoumeh Kheiri, National Cartographic Center, Iran

The NTDB consists of a number of individual layers that can be viewed separately or as a composite map: transportation, hydrology, cultural features, boundaries, vegetation, contours and etc.
The NTDB provides an excellent base for GIS and other desktop mapping applications: display and analysis of the data; adding ones own geographic or attribute data; or simply obtaining a printed map of selected layers. In this paper, designed semi automatic software (NTDB) has been described, and performance is presented in some detail. NTDB is a program written in VB in Microstation V8.1. It shows digital map in a view and feature in other zoomed view. It can show scanned speaking map, which has the names of features written on them, behind first view. Then by selecting the feature a box containing its attributes opens and permits operator to import or change them.

Toposcopy: A Modeling Tool for CityGML (348)
Annet Groneman, Toposcopie, Sisi Zlatanova, The Netherlands

The new 3D standard CityGML has been attracting a lot of attention in the last few years. Many characteristics of the XML-based format make it suitable for storage and exchange of virtual 3D city models. It provides possibilities to store semantic and geometric information and has the potential to incorporate topological models. A large number of CityGML models is already available in different parts of the world. However, still the creating of a 3D model according to conceptual schema of CityGML remains a challenge. In this paper we present a modeling software Toposcopy, which allows for creating of 3D models and exporting them in CityGML format.
Toposcopy follows basically a close-range photogrammetric approach to re-constructs 3D models with the help of 2D map and terrestrial geo-referenced images. The approach uses perspective projection to link points on the photos with the corresponding points on the 2D map. A soon as the 3D model is reconstructed, it can be organised according to CityGML spatial schema. Toposcopy appeared to be a handy tool to produce CityGML in LOD 2 and LOD3. The process of modelling is relatively fast, since various parametric mathematical models can be applied for a large number of houses. Some of the thematic and attribute information such as height, roof form, road type and usage can be automatically assigned to the features. Toposcopy is especially useful to model and visualise textured buildings, because it has both an automatic and a semi-automatic way of texture mapping. The developed software was tested in several projects.
The paper will present the software, the performed test and will discuss challenges in creating of CityGML features. The paper concludes with suggestions for improving the CityGML schema.

Geoloketten wants to deliver a lasting contribution in solving spatial problems by taking the lead in the realisation of an open infrastructure to exchange spatial information. A framework that allows the connection of geoloketten in a network based on open standards. The geoloketten network consists of a minimum of agreements and rules to allow participation in the network. Hereby making the access to spatial information easier. It has to be possible to get one overview of both the user agreement and possibilities of spatial information to answer a question.
After five years of intense work with a consortium of 13 participants we strike a balance. We've never had the pretention to finish within five years. The project functioned as a catalyst for technical developments en innovative collaboration platforms. With these attainments we start a new phase. The project ends, but the development must go on. By registering our results and experiences we provide a foundation to continue the innovation of the spatial infrastructure. As said by representative Jandirk Bulens of RGI project & geoloketten in this movie.
A movie about the fascinating search of journalism student Susan to the anwer to the question where to find relevant spatial information and how we can and are allowed to use it. Armed with her own film camera this question takes her to the desk of spatial information professor Arnold Bregt, talking to provincial executive Annemarie Moons, to the fire station of officer Bauke Ybema, the business of Johan van de Wiel, behind the laptop of VROM staff member en Atlas expert Julie Tham and on the farmstead of farmer Nol Hooijmaaijers. The movie provides an inspiring snapshot based on their answers and instantly offers new challenges to geo-Nederland.

Title Quality inspection and quality improvement of large spatial datasets (374)
Hainan Chen, Volker Walter, Universitaet Stuttgart, Germany

In this paper we introduce an approach for quality inspection and quality improvement of spatial data which is based on map matching and map fusion. The approach can be applied for very large datasets and considers the geometry, topology and thematic of the data. Spatial data are collected by different institutions for different purposes which lead to multiple representations of the same objects of the world. Multiple representations mean that redundant information is available which can be used for the inspection and improvement of the data quality. In our study we use the following data sets: GDF (NavTeq), GDF (TeleAtlas) and OpenStreetMap. All three datasets are representing the road network and are available for very large areas. The GDF data from TeleAtlas and NavTeq are represented in the same data model whereas the data model of OpenStreetMap is different. However, the modelling of the street network is similar in all data sets.
The first step is the matching of the objects of two or more different datasets. We developed a matching model that allows the matching of data with very different geometries. The next step is to evaluate the similarity of the matched data. A quality measure can be calculated based on the geometrical, topological and thematic similarity. The geometrical similarity is measured with a distance function, the topological and thematic similarity with statistical analyses. High similarity is an indicator for the relative quality. The last step is the fusion of the data sets.
First, the unmatched objects of one dataset are allocated in clusters and transferred into the other dataset using a geometrical transformation.
Afterwards, the attributes and semantic relationships of the matched objects are transferred with a rule-based approach from one data set into the other data set.
The paper consists of three parts. In the first part we discuss our matching approach. It will be shown that even though we have a very complex matching model, there still exist some problems. In the second part, the model for evaluating the similarity will be explained in detail and discussed on sample data. In the third part the data fusion concept is presented and results are shown. The potential of the approach is discussed on the evaluation with different datasets. An outlook to future research concludes the paper.

A New Approach to Managing Environmental Sensor Data (383)
Dieter Gawlick, Mike Turnill, Oracle Corporation, United Kingdom

Sensors are increasingly used to capture information in the environment. This sensor data can be used to understand and define various aspects of the current state, previous states and the evolution of Environmental data. Whilst access to current and historical data is important, it is even more important to be able to monitor incoming data for patterns that identify risks and opportunities. Traditionally, because the development of programs for such a task has proved so difficult, pattern recognition has been usually been carried out manually by domain experts. Extending these applications or using the same sensor data for new applications is equally difficult and revisiting sensor data is rarely a practical option.
However new developments in database technology now allow the behaviour of these domain experts to be mimicked, making the results more objective, more reliable and much more scalable. Instead of accessing the data with ad-hoc queries or just watching incoming streams of sensor data, experts can apply continuous queries to the incoming data stream . This technology will recognize pattern instances and creates actionable information. Rule creation is supported by data mining technologies that allow us to find and improve classifications and predictive patterns that reflect the knowledge of that domain. The sensor data store thus acts like a set of experts who are permanently watching incoming data and providing valuable information that allows us to notify agencies of risks (floods, fires, climate events etc) in a far more timely fashion and allows appropriate actions to be taken faster. It is also possible to use geospatial techniques to provide linkage between the sensor patterns and the locations of the events that are being discovered.
The concept of the Sensor Web (supported by evolving international standards like OGC SWE) should allow these techniques to be used internationally by combining of data from sensor arrays in multiple regions or countries thus enhancing the value of these new applications. The availability of consistent and well understood environmental data made available through the INSPIRE initiatives will be crucial to the effective use of these techniques.
This paper describes the various technologies that enable real time management of environmental information with examples. It discusses the state of the art of these technologies as well as the challenges that must be overcome.

In 2005 the governmental forest organisation of Saxony decided to start the development of a service-oriented Web GIS solution supporting its employees with needed functionality and relevant geoinformation. The decision based on an intensive conceptual phase was mainly driven by the following targets:
- The solution must be available on every computer within the intranet and internet without previous installation (only a web browser is needed).
- Software and data can be maintained and updated on central server.
- Data must be always up-to-date by direct integration from the data provider, which reduces the efforts for maintenance of secondary stored resp. foreign data.
- Functionality to search and integrate additional available data sets must be available.
To build up the planed SOA web solution, the governmental forest organisation of Saxony relies on the available services of the spatial data infrastructure of Saxony (GDI Sachsen) and decided to make use of con terra's (a GIS solution company from Muenster, Germany) sdi.suite to realize the solution.
In 2006 FGIS-online started and provides the user with the following functionality:
- Integration of the central AAA (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting) system
- Searching for geoinformation inside the metainformation systems of the spatial data infrastructure and the governmental forest organisation of Saxony
- Integration and use of different data services, focusing on OGC standards and the ESRI products listed below:
WMS (Web Map Service), WFS (Web Feature Service), ESRI's ArcIMS, ESRI's AGS (Map Service)
- Central configurable hierarchical gazetteer based on WFS-G (Web Feature Service Gazetteer) for selecting geo-objects like tree stands
- Drawing and editing objects based on WFS-T (Transactional Web Feature Service)
- central or local user based storing of map views as WMC documents (Web Map Context documents)
- Integration of the central business data warehouse with forest inventory information and generation of business reports
- Creating simple maps based on the visualized geodata
The paper will present a more detailed view on the architecture and functionality of FGIS-online and its integration inside the spatial data infrastructure of Saxony. Furthermore it will give an impression how spatial data infrastructures can help organisations dealing with geoinformation to improve their workflows by providing their employees the necessary data.