<p> The data modeling of the Medisolae-3D project: a good practice for thematic communities aiming at implementing Inspire</p><p>G. Martirano1, F. Vinci1, V. Gagliardi1, M. Bonazountas2, E. Nousi2 1Epsilon Italia srl, Mendicino (CS), Italy 2Epsilon International SA, Marousi, Greece</p><p>MedIsolae-3D is a European Union co-funded projects in the frame of the econtent+ Programme and it is carried out by fourteen partners from seven EU Member States. It addresses the needs of the islands to promote and strengthen their information technologies via the Internet, including their SDI, and assists islands to overcome barriers such as: gaps and duplication of spatial data, poor quality of datasets; seldom use of data standards; lack of metadata; lack of interoperability of existing geographic information services; organizational issues, incompatibility of different GI initiatives; lack of data sharing and re-use; different motivation and interests in SDI use; procedural, legal, financial and institutional barriers between public and private bodies related to the access & use of geodata. The main result of the project is a geoportal (www.medisolae-3d.eu, www.yassoo.travel), enriched by tourism-related content and functionalities, in which a series of spatial services and networking services allow accessibility to the spatial datasets and to the metadata of 100 Mediterranean islands having Santorini (Greece) as “show island”. The complex data modeling activities needed to achieve this result constitute a good practice for thematic communities aiming at implementing Inspire. The data modeling process has been developed in different phases and with different levels of complexity, mainly to facilitate the data-providers not necessarily familiar with ISO/TC-211 and Inspire formalisms, but at the same time to guarantee sufficient robustness of the data model to enable the harmonization of the spatial information. According to this implementation methodology, many versions of the data model and of the corresponding geodatabase have been produced, a first one consisting of multiple excel sheets for each Feature Type, allowing many data-providers to start to collect in advance their data in a structured way, and the last one, which doesn’t contain any substantial change with respect to the previous one but has been developed according to the ISO/TC-211 and Inspire formalisms. According to the user requirements identified in the initial phase of the project, a feature list which is in line with the Inspire themes and contains also Feature Types which are “non-Inspire-themes”, but at the same time useful/needed for the project geoportal attractiveness, has been defined. The selected Feature Types are: Administrative Units, Transport Networks, Hydrography and Protected Sites (belonging to the Annex I themes of the Inspire Directive), Elevation, Land Cover, Orthoimagery and Geology belonging to the Annex II themes of the Inspire Directive) and POIs (Points of Interest) and 3D buildings, which are the “non-Inspire-themes”. As soon as the first data model has been distributed to the partners, a data harmonization process started. In order to check the level of non-compliance of the datasets delivered by the partners with respect to the project data model, a proper matching table has been designed and a detailed matching analysis was required. After the completion of the data harmonization process, the final data model has been developed in adherence to the ISO/TC-211 and Inspire formalisms, according to the following steps: . Creation of the UML data model for the Inspire and the non-Inspire themes (with the Gentleware Poseidon sw). . Creation of the UML data model for the Inspire and the non-Inspire themes (with Microsoft Visio sw). . Generation of the Project Geodatabase (both ESRI Personal and File GDB formats) starting from the UML data model following an ESRI recommended procedure. . Generation of the GML application schema (XSD) for the Inspire and the non- Inspire themes. It has to be highlighted that two UML data models have been produced, the first one using a generic UML editor, while the second one using a data modeling procedure recommended by ESRI. In addition, it has been also tested a third procedure allowing a graphical design of the logical model of the Geodatabase using the free ESRI software ArcGIS Diagrammer. Since the data modeling activities of the Medisolae-3D project started at the beginning of 2008, one year in advance with respect to the release of final version of the Inspire Data Specifications for Annex I themes, the data model of the Medisolae-3D Feature Types belonging to the Inspire themes is not fully compliant with the corresponding Inspire data model. Nevertheless, the Medisolae-3D final data model, developed in adherence to the ISO/TC-211 and Inspire formalisms above described, allows an easy but at the same time rigorous data transformation process, enabling fully Inspire compliance of the spatial datasets, using as target and source schemas the Inspire and the Medisolae-3D schemas respectively. In terms of the Inspire purposes, the main achievements of the Medisolae-3D projects are: . adherence to the Inspire principle of establishing distributed architectures capable to provide harmonized interoperable datasets, more than creating centralized infrastructures; . possibility to comply with the requirements of those partners able to provide some spatial dataset only through WMS (Web Map Services); . flexibility of the project architecture, in the sense that all the single harmonized geodatabases (one for each island) can be easily transferred from the project server to the partner server (or to other “local” servers), assuming that the “local” hosting organization (local authority or third party) will establish the minimum infrastructure to handle the provision of the web services; . generation of a harmonized collection of spatial datasets structured according to a formal data model which is easily transformable into a collection of spatial datasets fully compliant to the Inspire Data Specifications.</p>