Implementing INSPIRE in Denmark- A standards-based Web services foundation for the Danish SDI

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director
Outreach
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.

The Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) (http://inspire.jrc.it/) is the European Commission Directive on European Spatial Data Infrastructure. This initiative aims to provide a foundation for the creation of a European spatial information infrastructure that delivers integrated spatial information services. These services will allow users to discover and access spatial or geographical information from a wide range of sources, from the local level to the European level, in an interoperable way for a variety of uses.

INSPIRE Principles

Data should be collected once and maintained at the level where this can be done most effectively.
It must be possible to combine seamlessly spatial information from different sources across Europe and share it between many users and applications.
It must be possible for information collected at one level to be shared between all the different levels, e.g. detailed for detailed investigations, general for strategic purposes.
Geographic information needed for good governance at all levels should be abundant and widely available under conditions that do not restrain its extensive use.
It must be easy to discover which geographic information is available, fits the needs for a particular use and under what conditions it can be acquired and used.
Geographic data must become easy to understand and interpret because it can be visualized within the appropriate context and selected in a user- friendly way.

The Digital Map Supply
In 2001, the Danish National Survey and Cadastre launched The Digital Map Supply as the platform for making spatial data and functionality available on the internet. The organisation’s decision to base The Digital Map Supply on a standards-based Web services architecture accurately anticipated the direction that INSPIRE would take.

The Digital Map Supply is built using the “service oriented architecture” (SOA) design philosophy. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides methods for systems development and integration where systems group functionality around business processes and package these as interoperable services (wikipedia). An SOA infrastructure allows different applications to exchange data with one another as they participate in business processes. A services approach aims at a loose coupling of services with operating systems, programming languages and other technologies that underlie applications.

An SOA infrastructure allows organisations to break with the old paradigm of passing large data files and loading them in their entirety into standalone software systems. In the new paradigm, software clients send queries to servers and the servers return the results of services that execute on remote Web servers. In the old paradigm, we used the internet (or LAN or physically transported storage media) to obtain a large data file from which we then painstakingly extracted information. In the new paradigm, we reach across the Web to get just the information we request. Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth exemplify this paradigm.

In addition to providing open interfaces to a variety of services, The Digital Map Supply relies on partnerships with software developers and defines conditions for use of Web services. The Digital Map Supply with its partner program makes it easy for software developers to integrate the geospatial infrastructure into mainstream Information Technology solutions.

The goal for The Digital Map Supply is decreasing barriers to users combining geospatial information from multiple sources in support of location (or geospatial) intelligence. Developing geospatial intelligence for an industrial site cleanup, for example, or a crop damage analysis, once required dedicated GIS systems and highly trained staff. The initial investments in software, data development and training were high. With Web service offerings, the managers of the Danish National Survey and Cadastre have seen a dramatic increase in the use of geospatial intelligence in mainstream solutions such as e-government. Over two hundred organisations have access to the services and more than twenty system integrator companies are involved in the partner programme. The use of The Digital Map Supply has tripled over the last two years, with a monthly average in 2008 of nine million requests per month. It is likely that most of these requests come from people who are not trained GIS users running expensive stand-alone software applications on their desktop computers.

Since The Digital Map Supply was launched, the Danish National Survey and Cadastre have continued to improve The Digital Map Supply’s offerings. They have introduced an open source environment -- "Vis Stedet" (Show Me Where) -- to make it easier to find and access geospatial information and make it easier for government bodies to overlay their own information on top of base data layers (reference data) in a shared geospatial infrastructure. Show Me Where is a cross-platform compatible Java-script API (application programming interface) that provides access to the Web services in The Digital Map Supply (and other information sources) and makes visualization of maps and other geospatial information simple for the integrator working in an Ajax framework. Show Me Where is an open source project that embeds other mature open source projects as components, including OpenLayers (http://openlayers.org/), which makes it easy for Web developers to put a dynamic map in any Web page.

Figure 1: This Show Me Where map view shows the locations of different kinds of schools. http://www.viskort.dk/VisKort/PopupMap.aspx?callingApp=borgerdk&mapThemes=bg,efterskole,fagskole,gymnasium,hskole,seminarium,skole)

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