GS Soil: Assessment and strategic development of INSPIRE compliant Geodata-Services for European Soil Data

Acronym of the case:

GS Soil

Web address of the case:

http://www.gssoil.eu/

Country of the case:

Austria , Belgium , Bulgaria , Czech Republic , Denmark , Finland , France , Germany , Greece , Hungary , Ireland , Poland , Portugal , Romania , Slovakia , Slovenia , Spain , United Kingdom

Posting Date:

18 January 2012

Last Edited Date:

15 February 2012

Author:

Katharina Feiden (Coordination Center PortalU at the Lower Saxony Ministry for Environment, Energy and Climate Protection)

INSPIRE directive | information sharing | Soil data

Type of initiative

Project or service
Network

Case Abstract

INSPIRE provides the framework for the establishment of a European Spatial Data Infrastructure. The cross-border use and applicability of data requires that specific standards and rules are fulfilled by data providers. Such rules are currently being developed as data specifications. Soil as a theme in the INSPIRE annex III is included in this process, and was selected as the target theme for the EU best practice network GS SOIL „Assessment and strategic development of INSPIRE compliant Geodata-Services for European soil data". The project contributes to the harmonization and provision of interoperable soil geodata in Europe. The main deliverable of the project is the web portal http://gssoil-portal.eu/, which provides information, data management tools and links to data sources. Examples are the soil specific multilingual thesaurus, a metadata editor and catalogue service, provision of WMS and prototype WFS.

The best practice network is co-funded by the European Community programme eContentplus, by the European Commission DG Information Society and Media in the duration from June 2009 - May 2012.

The network consortium comprises 34 partners from 18 EU member states. Project Coordinator is the Coordination Center PortalU at the Lower Saxony Ministry of Environment and Climate Protection (Germany). Overall 24 partners out of the consortium are soil data providers and will make the data available for the project. Hence, a complex and high quality data basis in a European context is assured. Beyond that, European institutions are also involved via the advisory board, as the European Environment Agency and the Joint Research Center of the EC.

The partners will establish and operate a network of services for spatial datasets and metadata. This network includes distributed services for data transformation, discovery, view and download. The final result of the project will be a central GS SOIL Portal, where European soil data from heterogeneous sources will be bundled. In order to ensure cross-border usability of the portal and related services, aspects of multilingualism and data interpretation will be considered thoroughly.

The project will extensively support the implementation of the INSPIRE requirements on basis of available experience in selected European countries and regions on different organizational levels. The planned results of the project are :

A consolidated soil-related theme catalogue and consolidated soil-related theme content-framework standards,
An INSPIRE compatible metadata profile for spatial soil datasets, dataset series and services,
Generic application schemes for soil information ,
A web portal (GS SOIL Portal) which provides access to all project soil data, including
- a view service which provides access to spatial soil data,
- discovery and view of the INSPIRE conform metadata for the provided soil maps,
- interoperable spatial soil datasets (for exemplary soil products),
- case studies on cross-boarder delivery of harmonised soil data access,
- Best practice guidelines for
  - creating and maintaining metadata for soil database ,
  - and for data harmonization.

Description of the case

Domain

eGovernment

Topic

High Impact Services with Pan-European Scope | Interoperability | Open Source | Regional and Local | User-centric Services

Sector

Education, Science and Research | Environment

Date

June 2009 to May 2012

Date operational

June 2009

Target Users

Scope

Cross-border | International | National | Pan-European

Status

Implementation

Language(s)

English

Policy Context and Legal Framework

The establishment of the European Soil Strategy has enforced the link between soil information and geo-information. This has generated the need for interoperable, accessible and harmonised soil datasets for the EU. The link is also addressed by the INSPIRE Directive (2007/2/EC) which pursues an EU Spatial Data Infrastructure to support environmental policies. GS Soil aims, through state-of-the-art methodologies and best practice examples, to improve harmonisation of national datasets and make them more accessible and exploitable. Therefore, it contributes to the INSPIRE implementation with specific reference to a cluster of data themes on nature conservation.

GS Soil aims at establishing a Best Practice Network dealing with a cluster of the data themes listed in the Annexes I to III of the INSPIRE Directive (2007/2/EC) and focused on soil related issues.

The establishment of the soil thematic strategy and the new transboundary EU approach for protected sites management has enforced the link between soil conservation and best practice use and geo-information. This has generated the need for interoperable, accessible and harmonised datasets for the EU. The link is also addressed by the INSPIRE Directive which pursues an EU Spatial Data Infrastructure to support environmental policies.

The GS Soil Network aims, through state-of-the-art methodologies and best practice examples, to improve harmonisation of national datasets and make them more accessible and exploitable within Europe. Therefore, the consortium contributes to the INSPIRE implementation with specific reference to a cluster of data themes on nature conservation (as per the INSPIRE Annexes). Within the INSPIRE directive the theme soil is explicitly addressed as an individual theme (Annex III) and besides that soil related environmental, agricultural and forestry aspects are also addressed in Annex II and III. According to this, the thematic focus of GS Soil is set on soil as an important parameter according to climate, land use, geology and geomorphology. At the same time soils are the basis for food production and consumer health, for the ecological and economical balance and for many other important bases of life.

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

Content provision

Overall Implementation approach

Partnerships between administration and/or private sector and/or non-profit sector

Technology choice

Mainly (or only) open standards | Open source software

Funding source

Public funding EU | Public funding national

Project size

Implementation: €1,000,000-5,000,000

Implementation and Management Approach

In the international GS SOIL consortium soil experts, data providers and technical experts work jointly together. The interdisciplinary team aims to build up an INSPIRE compliant spatial data infrastructure for European soil data.

The overall goal is to improve access to INSPIRE relevant soil data for public administration, citizens and private industry.

Concrete working steps

The GS SOIL consortium will provide best practice guidelines based on the project experiences. It will further make the results available as reference material for the INSPIRE Thematic Working Group on soil data specification.

Following working steps have been determined:

Specification of a structure to describe spatial soil data
Harmonisation of spatial soil metadata
Exemplary seemless combination of soil data (test cases)
Approach for semantic interoperability
Development of a generic data model
Stakeholder analysis, user testing, evaluation
Building up a central GS SOIL portal and integrated network
Development of a long term operation

The GS SOIL portal

The content related project results will be made available via the central one-stop portal of GS SOIL, which is reachable via http://gssoil-portal.eu

The portal offers different functionalities as:

map viewer via WMS
metadata-editor
advanced search
GS SOIL services
semantic services
etc.

It is to offer soil and soil related information provided by different administrational levels (European, national, regional) for all users and stakeholders (experts or other interested persons).

The information provided is of different kind:

Web sites
Metadata
Maps
Documents
Other data (e.g. observation data)

There is a continuous integration of data by the GS SOIL project partners. Currently, the portal interface is available in 13 languages.

Technology solution

Technically the portal is based on the software InGrid® of the German Environmental Information Portal (PortalU® - http://www.portalu.de). Several open tools were implemented to develop an integrated network as e.g. geonetworks, InGrid®-Editor etc. for data provision.

InGrid® is a modular software to realise a central access to digital, online available information and is based on free and open source technology.

The main features of InGrid® are search features like full-text search, ranked result lists and display of latest news (RSS-feeds). In order to visualize digital maps an OGC compliant web map service (WMS) should be used. For the involvement of external geo data catalogues and for the transfer of information to other spatial data infrastructure (SDI) InGrid® provides OGC compliant catalogue interfaces like the OGC-CSW 2.0.

Impact, innovation and results

Impact

The GS SOIL Portal

The GS SOIL community provides a centralized web access point for standardized, interoperable and INSPIRE compliant European soil information. In the GS SOIL Portal http://gssoil-portal.eu all soil related information from web pages, over databases to data catalogues will be made available and accessible. Search results will be ranked and listed in shared result lists. Spatial soil data from OGC compatible Web Mapping Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS) will be visualized in a map viewer. For all tasks within the project the GS SOIL Portal will be used as a platform for an improved access to soil data. GS SOIL Portal has been built in an iterative cycle, adopting the relevant INSPIRE Implementing Rules (Network Services and related) and on the basis of the InGrid software designed for the German Environment Information Portal (PortalU). Also general open tools and services will be provided for re-use by the project partners (data / service providers) and later technical integration of services and underlying geospatial data sets. Particular focus will be placed on mutual harvesting (CSW) with external systems. The current version of the GS SOIL Portal is already available in 13 project languages.

The product harvesting, as well as the development of so-called content-framework standards (terminology, reference material and definitions to compare soil data), are based on a substantial search for existing soil data in European countries. The result has been implemented into a catalogue of soil data existing in Europe with a specific focus on products provided through web-services.

Data quality, data management and metadata

In GS SOIL two soil data relevant metadata profiles (the first one for datasets and dataset series while the second is intended for describing a service) compliant to INSPIRE metadata and ISO standards were developed in 2010. Subsequently, metadata proposed by the GS SOIL community was delivered as reference material to the Thematic Working Group for the sections dealing with metadata and data quality in the first version of INSPIRE Annex III Data Specification on soil. INSPIRE Data Specifications contain requirements (that are legally mandated) and recommendations. On the other hand, INSPIRE Data Specifications may be hardly readable by data providers that are not aware of all underlying standards. Thus, it is complicated to get an overall picture. GS SOIL Best Practice Guidelines for creating and maintaining metadata for soil databases are intended to overcome this insufficiency.

Proposed Best Practice Guidelines are covering both - metadata and data quality aspects. This approach consists of several steps, including

a review of the GS SOIL metadata profile with respect to newly published INSPIRE documents (e.g. Commission Regulation 1089/2010 on interoperability of spatial data sets and services or new version 1.2 of Technical Guidelines on INSPIRE metadata),
connections between dataset metadata and feature-level metadata through a feature catalogue,
user-friendly guidelines for data providers who would like to describe their soil-related databases,
the GS SOIL metadata profile applied on two real soil datasets as examples,
guidelines on how to manage soil metadata in two or more languages,
brief information about the development of the soil specific multilingual thesaurus (which is in detail written in the following section)
and examples on usage of soil metadata within INSPIRE, i.e. spatial data infrastructure framework (e.g. how to get from dataset metadata to view/download service or dataset itself as well as description of related aspects).

Soil specific multilingual thesaurus

Sharing metadata and/or data generally leads to the need of common semantics, a common set of concepts and a common controlled vocabulary. This is a fact well-known long before the existence of IT and IT networks, and has lead to controlled lists of physical units, chemical elements, species lists or even to complete vocabularies like the medical or pharmaceutics vocabularies. Today thesauri and/or ontologies have become state of the art within communities and international projects even when the participants do not want to share data but "just" want to exchange their knowledge. Public institutions who collect data/information/knowledge from various parties meet this well-known need establishing controlled vocabulary and making it accessible for their data providers. The European Environmental Agency e.g. uses and publishes GEMET, the GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus, Which is provided in 26 languages, as multilingualism is a need for any European collaboration, not only in the environmental sector. Referencing concepts of GEMET is requested by the EU INSPIRE directive.

As GS SOIL aims to be INSPIRE compliant, GEMET has to be at least a part of the controlled vocabulary of that project. But GEMET represents a very general environmental vocabulary and needs more specific extensions for special domains, such as water, protected areas, air and - soil.

The GS SOIL Portal has a reference to a service for GEMET but for the reasons explained above, in addition to the preliminarily planned tasks, the GS SOIL community decided to establish a soil specific multilingual thesaurus in addition to the preliminarily planned tasks.

Application schema, data harmonization and interoperability

The application schema extended in GS SOIL and its implementation serve as reference material for the INSPIRE process of data specification development (e.g. proposal for a soil metadata profile). The GS SOIL amendments to the former ISO 28258 Working Draft were fed back into the ISO process. The application schema is tested with data from the GS SOIL data providing partners using a hands-on testing procedure description. The GS SOIL SoilML is compared with the currently developed INSPIRE application schema for soil data.

Lessons learnt

This field will be completed by the submitter when the lessons learnt have been identified and understood.

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practice GS Soil: Assessment and strategic development of INSPIRE compliant Geodata-Services for European Soil Data