Tomáš Kliment

Making more OGC services available on the web discoverable for the SDI community

The work presented in this paper describes preliminary results of the main activity performed in the research project Bolegweb, which is connected to activities done by the SmartOpenData project. The Bolegweb project aims at the development of a geospatial meta-search crawler to collect online accessible geospatial information (GI) resources and harvest geospatial metadata. Deployment of a graphical user and application programming interfaces providing access to collected resources will provide a gateway to GI resources for users and applications at all levels of the Web with a global coverage. More than 15 thousand OGC services collected within the last period, covering 17 months (October 2013 – April 2015) are collected and metadata for both services and resources are catalogued.

A comparison of address geocoding techniques – case study of the city of Zagreb, Croatia

In the last years a lot of online geocoding services have become available online. Some of them are based on VGI as input data. Such services are very useful in the case of big amounts of objects that need to be geocoded. However, the quality of such services has still not been adequately explored. In this paper we tried to answer several questions regarding the quality of online geocoding services using the city of Zagreb in Croatia as a research area. The results of research showed that the currently available services need improvements to provide accurate sources for geocoding.

Interoperable Volunteered Geographic Information Empowering e-Governance Processes: Case Study for Land Use Dataset in the City of Zagreb

Spatial data resources have become very important phenomena in Europe within the last few decades. They are especially important in large cities due to the urbanisation trend. The expansion of urban areas due to the rise in the population and economic growth is increasing demand on natural resources, thereby causing land use changes. It is expected that by 2040, more than 60 % of the world’s population will live in cities. In order to manage sustainable development and support e-governance processes, the efficient integration of relevant spatial data is needed. Land use data deliver an asset for local governments to develop better strategy for urbanistic planning, in order to manage land in a sustainable way. This work presents the methodology used to collect VGI observations for land use area definition based on the LUCAS (Land Use and Cover Area frame Survey) fieldwork methodology, HILUCS (Hierarchical INSPIRE Land Use Classification System), and reference topographic dataset. The practical research work was performed in June 2014 during the GIS Summer School in the city of Zagreb, in a dual collaboration between the Faculty of Geodesy, University of Zagreb and Faculty of Horticulture and Landscape Engineering, Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra. The results try to offer and verify a suitable proposal for fieldwork methodology and updating a land use database in line with the INSPIRE directive applicable at the local spatial data infrastructure level.

Image data and metadata workflows automation in geospatial data infrastructure deployed for agricultural sector

Nowadays Spatial Data Infrastructures are the best practice to publish huge amount of spatial data on the Web in an interoperable and distributed way. Nevertheless, this operation requires a significant effort, expertise and motivation to data providers. In this paper, we propose an original approach to support geo-data providers by automating the workflows for publishing geo-data and relative web services for a given application. The prototypal solution has been tested on a real case study to support the regional or national agricultural sector in Italy.

Geospatial Information Relevant to the Flood Protection Available on The Mainstream Web

Abstract Flood protection is one of several disciplines where geospatial data is very important and is a crucial component. Its management, processing and sharing form the foundation for their efficient use; therefore, special attention is required in the development of effective, precise, standardized, and interoperable models for the discovery and publishing of data on the Web. This paper describes the design of a methodology to discover Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) services on the Web and collect descriptive information, i.e., metadata in a geocatalogue. A pilot implementation of the proposed methodology - Geocatalogue of geospatial information provided by OGC services discovered on Google (hereinafter “Geocatalogue”) - was used to search for available resources relevant to the area of flood protection. The result is an analysis of the availability of resources discovered through their metadata collected from the OGC services (WMS, WFS, etc.) and the resources they provide (WMS layers, WFS objects, etc.) within the domain of flood protection.

LAND USE DATASET COLLECTION AND PUBLICATION BASED ON LUCAS AND HILUCS

Abstract Spatial data have become very important phenomena within the last decade in Europe due to a strong support from the political spectrum with regard to related legislation and resulting in financial support to several research, educational, and enlargement projects. INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) Directive indeed defines the principles for the harmonization of spatial data infrastructure in the European community, including Land Use and Land Cover data themes. INSPIRE defines a methodology on how to transform datasets to common data models, but it does not cover the process of data collection and update, because it is out of its scope. Evaluation of the Land Use dataset derived from remote sensing products complemented by fieldworks has been realized since 2006 by Eurostat within the LUCAS (Land Use and Cover Area frame Survey) project. The work presented in this paper follows the LUCAS fieldwork methodology, which was applied during the fieldwork in July 2014 in the City of Zagreb (Croatia), to use at the local (municipal) geoportal level. The surveying groups collected point features with the following data type attributes: Land Use codes defined by HILUCS (Hierarchical INSPIRE Land Use Classification System) and optional Land Cover codes defined by LUCAS classification. In addition, photographs representing the observed areas were collected by cameras embedded in the mobile GIS platforms. An update of original topological layer was performed and Web GIS components for sharing the newly developed datasets were implemented. The results presented provide a suitable proposal for fieldworks methodology and updates of a land use database in line with the INSPIRE directive applicable at a local spatial data infrastructure level.