SINAnet and SPCoop as the enabling technological framework of the INSPIRE rules in Italy
L. Dell’Amico 1, C. Iannucci 2, V. Sambucini3
1ALMAVIVA S pA, Rome, Italy
2University “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy
3ISPRA (Higher Institute for Environment Protection and Research), Rome, Italy
The INSPIRE network services are being implemented in Italy in the context of the already existing infrastructures of interest for the public administrations, the enterprises and the citizens.
Among such infrastructures, we highlight:
§ SINAnet, the organisational network that maps the EIONET components to the co-operating agencies entrusted for environment protection;
§ SPC/SPCoop, the infrastructure built to support the interoperability among the information systems of the public sector.
Both infrastructures (organisational and technical at the same time) are well rooted in the Italian context and are gaining an increasing consensus in terms of community of involved users and wealth of provided services. Therefore, the compliance to INSPIRE has to be carried out in a wider context of compliances to other pre-existent rules. Moreover, as far as the environment information is concerned, not only INSPIRE but also SEIS and GMES has have to be taken into account.
As known, while INSPIRE deals with the access to the spatial data, SEIS addresses globally the environment data and their dataflows, irrespective if geo-referenced or not. SEIS will build on the work of INSPIRE through defining standards and interoperability and GMES will contribute to improving the monitoring infrastructure as well as the data services.
Of course, all the above mentioned initiatives have to be considered coherent from a strategic point of view, sharing the ultimate goal of making it easier to access and exploit the information. However, some problems may arise at the implementation level: the standards and solutions referenced by the INSPIRE implementing rules are not always (or not yet) supported by the pre-existent technological framework. The focus is here set upon such class of problems. For such problems, it is also shown how to cope with them.
An example of such problems is the deployment of the registers. In order to support the network service of Discovery, the architecture of the INSPIRE requires the availability of registers of metadata describing services and datasets, to be accessed through the national portal. SINAnet is based on a set of networked systems, each of them sharing a public area on the basis of a global agreement; therefore, each register is delegated to the level of the entity actually providing the relevant services and/or owning the relevant datasets: therefore, the granularity of such entities can be as high as necessary and in theory each register is directly accessible. Moreover, SPC/SPCoop aims to support the application interoperability among many different systems (possibly with huge legacies) and treats each of such systems as a separate domain, whose interface is a logical gateway, which provides a unique access point and totally masks the heterogeneity of the single domain; the registers are accordingly located on such gateway (not on the entity as in SINAnet) and, again, are directly accessed.
At a lower level, another problem can be found as far as the tools of technically building the web services are concerned. Currently, for the network services MTOM has been indicated as a reference, according to the choices suggested by OGC. However, SPCoop does not yet supports MTOM and still indicates SwA; while robust and widely exploited, SwA is credited of lesser performances that could possibly be an obstacle to meet the most stringent requirements of the foreseen SLA for the INSPIRE nmetwork services.
Last but not least, some experiences have been carried out in exploiting the metadata proposed by INSPIRE to describe the spatial information managed in the context of SINAnet. Such experiences, while confirming the need for a reliable structure of metadata, have highlighted some punctual inconsistencies, whose reconciliation appears to be advisable.
The above implies that a careful timing of the adoption of the different technical solutions indicated by the INSPIRE implementing rules appears to be of interest. On the other hand, the availability of such technical solutions can surely foster the evolution of the current SINAnet and SPCoop, paving also the way towards the SEIS system of systems.,a distributed European system for all relevant environmental data, based on the same principles as INSPIRE, in which systems for reporting data and information are increasingly replaced by systems based on access and interoperability.
SEIS will build on the work of INSPIRE through defining standards and interoperability and GMES will contribute to improving the monitoring infrastructure as well as the data services.
The implementation of the SEIS requires a good INSPIRE implementation, a pre-requisite for the spatial data, and a focus on the:
· Extension to non-spatial data and non-numerical data (INSPIRE +)
· Extension of the information services foreseen by INSPIRE (INSPIRE ++)
· Tidying the reporting requirements with a view to developing a coherent reporting system.