The document discusses the EnviroGRIDS @ Black Sea Catchment project, which aims to build capacities in the Black Sea region to use international standards to gather, store, distribute, analyze, visualize, and disseminate environmental information. It does this by building a modern Spatial Data Infrastructure and GeoPortal that will integrate into the Global Earth Observation System of Systems. The GeoPortal allows users to discover, access, and use spatial data and services. It implements various OGC standards and is now part of the GEOSS infrastructure to support environmental monitoring and decision making.
Ist africa2012 solution supporting building of global earth observation systems_1
1. Solution Supporting Building of Global Earth
Observation Systems of Systems Building (GEOSS)
Premysl Vohnout
Czech Centre for Science and Society
Czech Republic
Session 9f, 11 May 2012 IST-Africa 2012 Copyright 2012 CCSS
2. Introduction
• The Global Earth Observation System of Systems
(GEOSS) has been built by the Group on Earth
Observations (GEO).
• The GEOSS is focused on user needs and support better
utilisation of enviromental data and decision-support tools by
users
• EnviroGRIDS @ Black Sea Catchment aims at
– building capacities in the Black Sea region,
– to use new international standards to gather, store, distribute,
analyze, visualize and disseminate crucial information on past,
present and future states of this region, in order to assess its
sustainability and vulnerability.
Session 9f, 11 May 2012 IST-Africa 2012 Copyright 2012 CCSS
3. Introduction
• To achieve its objectives, EnviroGRIDS is building modern
Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) that will become one
component in GEOSS, compatible with the new EU
directive on Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the
European Union (INSPIRE).
• EnviroGRIDS GeoPortal is designed as „virtual database“.
– It uses principles of Uniform Resource Management System (URM)
and Geoportal4everybody
– It integrates different technologies like Geographic Information
System (GIS), multimedia, Content Management System, social
media.
Session 9f, 11 May 2012 IST-Africa 2012 Copyright 2012 CCSS
4. Objectives
• The main objectives of the implementation of GeoPortal
cover the implementation of following services:
• Discovery services: supporting discovery of data, evaluation
and use of spatial data and services through their metadata
properties.
• View services: as a minimum, display, navigate, zoom
in/out, pan, or overlay spatial data and display legend
information and any relevant content of metadata
• Download services: enabling copies of complete spatial
data sets or parts of such sets to be downloaded
• Transformation services: enabling spatial data to be
transformed (projection and harmonization)
Session 9f, 11 May 2012 IST-Africa 2012 Copyright 2012 CCSS
5. Objectives
• Invoke spatial data services: enabling data services to be
invoked.
• This implementation is done using Open Geospatial
Consortium (OGC) services
– Web Map Service (WMS),
– Web Feature Services (WFS),
– Web Coverage Services (WCS),
– Web Processing Services (WPS),
– Catalogue Services for Web (CSW)
• All of this services will be made also interoperable with Grid
services
Session 9f, 11 May 2012 IST-Africa 2012 Copyright 2012 CCSS
6. Methodology
• EG portal can be seen from two sides:
– As a client accessing external services.
– As a server making data and services available for other
components of SDI (INSPIRE and GEOSS based) or for GRID
service.
• EG portal supports easy registration of different spatial
services (here is client). The system offers possibilities
to:
– Register services temporally for visualisation
– Register services to catalogue
– Connect temporally other catalogue into discovery client of
GeoPortal
– Register catalogoue services fo harvesting
• EG portal provides tools for users to create services (here
is server)
Session 9f, 11 May 2012 IST-Africa 2012 Copyright 2012 CCSS
10. Developments
• The enviroGrids GeoPortal is divided into four basic
buildings blocks, which are currently implemented:
• Metadata management (editing, discovery, access,
harvesting)
• Data management (upload, download, import to DB, OGC
service publishing)
• Data visualization (local data, WMS, WFS, KML and
management of WMC)
• Content management (publishing of context and connection
with social networks)
Session 9f, 11 May 2012 IST-Africa 2012 Copyright 2012 CCSS
11. Results
• EG portal ensures that any user can easily discover,
evaluate and use any type of information.
• Core component of the system is metadata management
system
– It allows to manage any types of information.
– It allows to search and share data using catalogue service and
social networks.
• Tools which are mainly used also in other portals are:
– MIcKA
– HSLayers
– Mapserver or Geoserver
Session 9f, 11 May 2012 IST-Africa 2012 Copyright 2012 CCSS
12. Results
• EG portal provides:
– Discovery service
• Writing and publishing INSPIRE-compliant metadata
– View service
• Publishing data using INSPIRE-compliant view service (WMS
1.3.0)
– Download service
• This is most problematic part. But portal provides reliable
solution. Problems are performance and interoperability.
Session 9f, 11 May 2012 IST-Africa 2012 Copyright 2012 CCSS
13. Conclusion and outlook
• EG portal is now part of of GEOSS infrastructure.
• Solution supports both major SDI iniatives INSPIRE as well
as GEOSS.
• It can be now used as tool for capacity building in region.
• Curently it offers:
– List of basic services to integrate data in any region.
– Harvesting of available data and services
– Integrated access point for data in region
• This experiences can be transferred to other regions
including Africa
Session 9f, 11 May 2012 IST-Africa 2012 Copyright 2012 CCSS
14. Conclusion and outlook
• Basic infrastructure is prepared for
– management of metadata and data
– publishing and accessing services
• In final phases of development was done heavy tests of
services related to GEOSS and EnviroGRIDS
– We discovered a lot of interoperability problems. This is mainly
problem of version of services.
– It is necessary to cooperate with services providers to fix problems.
– Biggest problems are with new WFS versions, WCS and CSW
services.
• There is generally needed more work on newer standards
to provide advanced clients for WPS and SOS
Session 9f, 11 May 2012 IST-Africa 2012 Copyright 2012 CCSS