Open strategies to collect and share Geographic Information under INSPIRE perspective in Regione Piemonte
S. Campus (*), G. Siletto (*), S.Griffa (**), R. Lucà (**), D. Mo (**), S. Ratto (**)
(*) Regione Piemonte – Turin, Italy
(**) CSI-Piemonte, Turin, Italy
INSPIRE principles are more and more important today, in a context of increasing reduction of available economic resources but increasing need to have proper information to support coordinated and shared territorial governance. Regione Piemonte runs since 2003 the regional SDI SITAD, which already supported the greatest part of INSPIRE components and could be considered a building block of the NSDI (see “Spatial Data Infrastructures in Italy: State of play spring 2011”), but was not completely compliant and able to ensure a shared use among stakeholders.
Carrying on the collaboration with CSI Piemonte, Regione Piemonte moved from SITAD to GeoPortale Piemonte (www.geoportale.piemonte.it), a new geoportal able to offer INSPIRE network service in a diffused and shared way. It has been developed starting from the open source catalogue GeoNetwork (http://geonetwork-opensource.org/), which is completely open and doesn’t use any vendors’ solution to perform view and download services.
Few customizations have been done, particularly related to those elements necessary to improve the metadata schema according to RNDT (Italian metadata catalogue) of Italian NSDI, and to extend the search criteria to include DPSIR (Driving forces - Pressures - State - Impact- Responses) categories, with the intention to share them freely with all the other interested stakeholders (download already possible at https://github.com/geosolutions-it/geonetwork). Thanks to this work GeoPortale Piemonte make available metadata for geographic data and services according to INSPIRE and RNDT metadata elements.
Just few words about the network services available:
Discovery services:
· metadata entry: web form accessible toregistered users to describe territorial information according to INSPIRE and RNDT profile;
· supporting of CSW 2.0.2 for metadata harvesting;
· XML files upload and export;
· search and retrieve within the federated metadata catalogues: all users (not registered too) can discover and consult metadata through:
o Keywords
o classification
o public authorities
o temporal reference
o thematic categories
o annex INSPIRE themes
o DPSIR (Driving forces - Pressures - State - Impact- Responses) framework
o geographical location
View services:
· Geoservices based on standard OGC protocols (WMS and WFS) which can be retrieved and used both from internal and from external viewers, i.e. users’ desktop;
· Internal viewer to display WMS and WFS services both from the metadata catalogue and from external sources;
Download services:
According to permissions and profiles it’s possible to download data and check the related licence of use.
Thanks to this solution it has been realized a diffused geoportal, in which GeoPortale Piemonte can be considered the main hub related to the other portals of Provinces, Municipalities and Publics Bodies of Piedmont region, able to work together thanks to the CSW OGC standard, and so ensuring that data (and metadata) are collected and kept “where they can be maintained most effectively”.
Just to strengthen this aspect, the GeoPortal is strictly related with other open source solutions which let final users to discover data and work with them directly from their desktops, while performing their tasks. A great knowledge has been acquired about the open source Quantum GIS (http://www.qgis.org/), and some plug-ins have been developed in CSI Piemonte to improve data access and metadata discovery, according to INSPIRE principle “Geographic information needed for good governance at all levels should be readily and transparently available”.
Next step to foster a increasingly simplified and distributed data access is to use ontologies connected to metadata to perform semantic search, and some activities of this type have been already started(as described in another specific abstract).