OpenData and INSPIRE with GeoServer, GeoNetwork and MapStore: lessons learned from real-world use cases

A. Aime(*), S. Giannecchini(*), G. Vannuccini (**), G. Menduni (**), S. Griffa (***) (*) GeoSolutions SAS, Italy, (**) Municipality of Florence, Italy (***) CSI-Piemonte, Consortium for Information Systems, Italy

In the last couple of years the OpenData movement has been gaining momentum thanks to the high demand for transparency and participation arising from citizens asking for open access to data produced or acquired by Public Administrations around the world. This growth has dramatically impacted the work of those responsible for setting up and administering Spatial Data Infrastructures in Public Administrations, since they are suddenly expected to deliver data in ways and to levels that are extremely different from what had been envisaged and implemented before.

As a result of the growth in popularity of the concept of OpenData, SDIs have been asked to cope with the possibility to support a wider, uninitiated (to the GIS concepts) audience; this has forced the administrators to look at what they had built and used previously from a completely different perspective, that is the one of the common citizen trying to access, as an instance, the real time parking availability data for its own non-professional usage. This has challenged the administrators to perform a mental shift from a previous situation, where the users were essentially coming from the professional world, in order to rethink the pattern of interaction with them and the interfaces (both in terms of Service Interface as well as User Interface) for accessing data and services. Suddenly, the focus moved from protecting data from mass access to actually stimulating and encouraging wide open access to the very same data (or to even more data than before) which in turn presented brand new challenges in terms of hardware and software resources available to support this new workload (scalability has become a primary concern) but also in terms of selecting, cleaning and organizing internal data repositories.

Alongside with the OpenData wave, which was coming from the end users themselves evolving outside the usual standardization processes as a bottom-up process, the INSPIRE directive has come into force with a set of Implementing Rules and Technical Guidelines resulting from a standardization process following the usual (which is not, per se, a synonym of successful) top-down approach. INSPIRE placed on SDIs shoulders an additional burden in terms of requirements to be implemented in order to be compliant with, having in mind the goal to establish a European-wide infrastructure for spatial information to help with making geospatial information accessible and interoperable for the widest possible audience. Simplifying, for the SDI responsible of a European Public Administration this brings in additional requirements in terms of rules and standards to be supported and implemented at the services level in order to allow them to interoperate with other INSPIRE compliant services and clients. This paper will focus on reporting the first-hand experience of implementing and managing SDIs adhering to the INSPIRE technical guidelines to support the demand for OpenData employing well-known Open Source components like GeoServer1, GeoNetwork2 and MapStore3. After a short review on what INSPIRE mandates (limited to the services of interest for our use cases) we will introduce and discuss in details the level of compliancy with the technical guidelines of the Open Source components we currently use for building SDIs (GeoServer, GeoNetwork and MapStore), highlighting weaknesses and points of strength and then we will present a few real world use-cases. Eventually, we will provide our perspective on benefits as well as shortcomings of the INSPIRE initiative with respect to creating SDI infrastructures suitable for OpenData dissemination.

1 http://geoserver.org/ 2 http://geonetwork-opensource.org/ 3 http://mapstore.geo-solutions.it/