Iwona Kaczmarek

The Academic SDI—Towards Understanding Spatial Data Infrastructures for Research and Education

The demand for geospatial data across different disciplines and organisations has led to the development and implementation of spatial data infrastructures (SDI) and the theory and concepts behind them. An SDI is an evolving concept about facilitating and coordinating the exchange of geospatial data and services between stakeholders from different levels in the spatial data community. Universities and other research organisations typically have well-established libraries and digital catalogues for scientific literature, but catalogues for geospatial data are rare. Geospatial data is widely used in research, but geospatial data produced by researchers is seldom available, accessible and usable, e.g., for purposes of teaching or further research after completion of the project. This chapter describes the experiences of a number of SDI implementations at universities and research institutes. Based on this, the Academic SDI, an SDI for research and education, is defined and its stakeholders are described. The purpose, scope and stakeholders of the Academic SDI are described based on the formal model of an SDI developed by the International Cartographic Association (ICA) Commission on SDIs and Standards (formerly the Commission on Geoinformation Infrastructures and Standards). The results contribute to understanding the state-of-the-art in SDI implementations at universities and research institutes; how the Academic SDI differs from a ‘regular’ SDI; and which role players need to be involved in a successful SDI implementation for research and education.

Enriching and improving the quality of linked data with GIS

Abstract Standardization of methods for data exchange in GIS has along history predating the creation of World Wide Web. The advent of World Wide Web brought the emergence of new solutions for data exchange and sharing including; more recently, standards proposed by the W3C for data exchange involving Semantic Web technologies and linked data. Despite the growing interest in integration, GIS and linked data are still two separate paradigms for describing and publishing spatial data on the Web. At the same time, both paradigms offer complementary ways of representing real world phenomena and means of analysis using different processing functions. The complementarity of linked data and GIS can be leveraged to synergize both paradigms resulting in richer data content and more powerful inferencing. The article presents an approach aimed at integrating linked data with GIS. The approach relies on the use of GIS tools for integration, verification and enrichment of linked data. The GIS tools are employed to enrich linked data by furnishing access to collection of data resources, defining relationship between data resources, and subsequently facilitating GIS data integration with linked data. The proposed approach is demonstrated with examples using data from DBpedia, OSM, and tools developed by the authors for standard GIS software.

A Novel Approach for Publishing Linked Open Geodata from National Registries with the Use of Semantically Annotated Context Dependent Web Pages

Many of the standards used to build spatial data infrastructure (SDI), such as Web Map Service (WMS) or Web Feature Service (WFS), have become outdated. They do not follow current web technology development and do not fully exploit its capabilities. Spatial data often remains available only through application programming interfaces (APIs), reflecting the persistence of organizational silos. The potential of the web for discovering knowledge hidden in data and discoverable through integration and fusion remains very difficult. This article presents a strategy to take advantage of these newer semantic web technologies for SDI. We describe the implementation of a public registry in the age of Web 3.0. Our goal is to convert existing geographic information systems (GIS) data into explicit knowledge that can be easily used for a variety of purposes. This turns SDI into a framework to utilize the many advantages of the web. In this paper we present the working prototype system developed for the province of Mazowieckie in Poland and describes the underlying concepts. Further development of this approach comes from using linked data (LD) with expert systems to support analysis functions and tasks.

New Spatial Planning Data Access Methods Through The Implementation Of The Inspire Directive

Abstract Constant access to reliable information concerning future land use is of utmost importance for the real estate market as well as for spatial monitoring and public participation in spatial planning. The implementation of the INSPIRE Directive (Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 March 2007 establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) introduces new means for sharing spatial planning data. According to the Act of March 4 2010 on Spatial Information Infrastructure, which is a transposition of the Directive, every member state is obliged to publish data and metadata concerning the subject of spatial planning. In the Directive, this is defined as a “territory characterized according to its current and future planned functional dimension or socio-economic purpose (e.g., residential, industrial, commercial, agricultural, forestry, recreational)”. In the article, the authors present new possibilities for spatial planning data access, which result from the implementation of the INSPIRE Directive with the use of new information technologies, in the context of real estate management conditions.