EuroSpec service : a preliminary vision

Transcription

1 Joint EuroSDR/EuroGeographics Workshop, BKG Frankfurt, Germany, February 2005 "NMCA's and the Internet II" Electronic Delivery and Feature Serving The February date of the Workshop, determined by the timing requirements of the project to establish the baseline of current capabilities and practice within NMCA s, led to the 35 delegates enjoying the delights of Frankfurt under snow. The advent of President George W. Bush at Frankfurt Airport on the morning of the workshop added complications for those travelling by air, but the logistic management skills of BKG s Dr. Andreas Busch and his team overcame all, with one opening session speaker arriving just ten minutes before taking the floor! Professor Dietmar Grünreich, President of the Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie (BKG) and President of EuroGeographics, welcomed the delegates with interesting accounts of both organisations and their objectives. The federal structure of Germany is in many respects a microcosm of the challenges faced in establishing a pan-european mapping and spatial data infrastructure. Keith Murray, President of EuroSDR, told delegates that the NMA's and the Internet I held at Southampton in 2000 had been very influential in helping some NMA s formulate their Web strategies. Since then EuroGeographics had expanded to include cadastral agencies, a fact reflected in the programme of this workshop. Peter Woodsford and Claude Luzet then introduced the project and outlined the objectives and structure of the workshop. Eurospec underpins a move by European NMCA s to focus on interoperability, both business and technical. This

2 involves a shift from product to service and from centralised to decentralised infrastructure: service : a preliminary vision NMCA -a schema Service User Applications & Services NMCA -b schema NMCA -c schema Server and Portal End users will enable NMCA s to play their role in INSPIRE and to meet the requirements of users with pan-european needs. The aims of the Workshop were to establish the state-of-the-art and near term expectations/plans in electronic delivery of geographical information and to support the project by initiating an in depth survey of practice and plans in contributing NMA's and NMCA s. Rather than cover all the standards and technologies involved the technical focus was on two key areas that are fundamental to the realisation of and that are currently undergoing rapid development Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Schema Translation. Graham Vowles and Roland Wagner, co-chairs of the GeoDRM Working Group of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), then gave a joint presentation of the GeoDRM Abstract Rights Model and the need for an SDI business model. This was complemented later in the workshop by a presentation on current projects and technical progress. The session ended with players representing owner, licensor, licencee, payment provider, user, service provider and licence manager acting out various scenarios. The use of playing cards and paper money added to the atmosphere of a casino, as the other delegates crowded round to watch. The day ended with a very enjoyable reception and buffet dinner in the splendid surroundings of the Villa Mumm, headquarters of BKG:

3 Dietmar Grünreich and Claude Luzet enjoy a toast. The morning session on the Thursday was on Current Examples of Spatial edelivery in NMCA s. Manfred Endrullis described the online delivery and related services at BKG, Germany, which have been operational since September The GeoDataCenter collects, checks and harmonises data from the 16 Länder and offers products for online and offline delivery. Maps are served and raster data, supported by an extensive metadata service. Future plans include vector data delivery in GML and online data capture/update by emergency services (fire, police, etc.) using mobile devices. Ulf Hedlund described capabilities and developments at Lantmäteriet, Sweden, including service provision for professional users and the general public, a new system for handing land registration and a portal for environmental information. Their site is the third biggest e-commerce site in Sweden, with 450,000 viewers monthly. Map searching is supported both on current and historical data holdings. Current projects include MapMate, which makes all their maps available on demand using a GPS enabled mobile device, and Digital Map Library, which links all university libraries enabling users to view and search for Lantmäteriet s maps, images and elevation data. Peter Stolk of the Dutch Kadaster gave a presentation on E-conveyancing using Public Key Infrastructures. This was a valuable account of the use of digital signatures, signed by smartcard or crypto-server and using asymmetric cryptography, in an application area which requires very high security. Such techniques are increasingly supported in recent legislation. The current implementation, which is based on Java Web Start and PKCS#11, was demonstrated live by Peter, using his SmartCard. The session concluded with a presentation by Eddie Curtis of Snowflake Software on their experiences and capabilities in Schema Translation. The OGC

4 CIPI1.2 Testbed involved serving two different transportation data sources (US NTAD and Census TIGER) to a global transportation schema. This was achieved but semantic inconsistencies were highlighted as well as issues of minimum content or completeness and quality (accuracy, currency). Technical advances are such that data interoperability is achievable where common community semantics exist. This means that storage formats can be separated from delivery formats, so enabling a range of application schema to be served from a common data storage schema (and conversely). Commercial industrial strength implementations of Schema Translation Services are now becoming available. The morning ended with breakout sessions on What does an SDI require of its constituents? One group approached this from the viewpoint of the SDI designer and the other from that of a contributing agency. Delegates were appropriately divided into right-hand brains and left-hand brains in groups led by Graham Vowles and Peter Woodsford and reported by Eddie Curtis and Christiane Katterfeld. The afternoon session covered edelivery services by related organisations. David Medyckyj-Scott described the Delivery of Geo-services at the EDINA National Data Centre, Scotland. In contrast to the Swedish service to universities, EDINA operates on a subscription basis. Core services include UKBorders, an on-line boundary data delivery service covering UK geographies (census, electoral, administrative, postal) from 1840 to present day, and Digimap, a 'virtual map library which provides access to Ordnance Survey GB maps and data via easy-to-use, mapbased interface. All services are now exposed via OGC interfaces, and the next challenge is OS MasterMap, delivered and served in GML. Stefan Sandmann described the TIM-online service and the provision of Reference Data in the Geodata Infrastructure of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany, where they have benefited from a strong Joint egovernment strategy - Deutschland- Online. TIM-online provides easy to use and free access to reference data for everyone. It uses a lightweight Web client which accesses a network of live Web Map Server (WMS) services. Usage levels are high, with 40 million requests over a recent 81 day period. It also allows users to notify the agency of discrepancies in the data to direct future survey and update. To date over a three month period, 300 useful notifications have been received with no fakes. Jean-Jacques Serrano gave a presentation on the experience of the French Geological Survey (BRGM) in Delivering Geoscience Information. BRGM have to provide public authorities with the necessary tools for surface, subsurface and naturalresource management, for natural-risk and pollution prevention and for regional planning and development. Their InfoTerre architecture is strongly based on ISO TC 211 / OGC standards and uses mappings between data fields (in Oracle Spatial) and Web Service features (in GML). The next release will include a unified Catalogue service and new services for 3D views and cross sections and for DEM delivery (using a Web Coverage service). A Testbed is underway on the use of the extended Markup Mining Language (XMML) as a standard for geological community. Roland Wagner finished the session by covering DRM from a practical standpoint. He described work on the Web Pricing & Ordering Service (WPOS) and the XML Configuration & Pricing Format (XCPF). Geo-product pricing is complex due to high value and prices and the wide range of configuration possibilities. No suitable mainstream solution is available. Embedding Web Services with WPOS requires cascading of services. Projects to do this have taken place at OSGB, at Geobroker Brandenburg and at NRW and a new cross-border project is under way between State Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg.

5 The second Breakout sessions, facilitated by Colin Bray and Keith Murray and reported by David Medyckyj-Scott and Barend Köbben, addressed what had been learned to date and what gaps had been identified. The final morning covered Pilots, Projects and Plans. Jesko Schaper described KOGIS, a coordination of geographic information and geographic information systems by Swisstopo, the Federal Office of Topography of Switzerland. The geocat.ch project set up a metadata catalogue for GI, permitting users to add, edit, manage and search for metadata on the Internet. Partners can manage and serve their own metadata or deliver it via a central service. geocat.ch will be a partner in EuroMapFinder (EMF), a EuroGeographics service that is being built using a similar architecture and technology base. Future issues for the Swiss SDI include update and the achievement and maintenance of consistency between WMS and WFS layers, quality control of third party data and the role of UDDI in discovery. Graham Vowles then described progress and results from the OSGB Magnesium Project. Following the Capture, Edit, Maintain, Publish, Consume services paradigm, OSGB plan an evolution through Web Map (WMS), Web Feature (WFS) and Web Feature Transactional (WFS-T) Services. Magnesium sets out to create an externally accessible OGC compliant Web Map and Web Feature Server accessible by OS partners. A Full national coverage of OS MasterMap topographic and address layers is served to over 22 partners. To date, 77% of partners have used the WMS and 14% have used the WFS. The later can support insert, update, delete, query and discovery operations. Phase Two will address Change Only Update and a more capable Transactional Web Feature Service. On-demand services are making it easier for partners and customers to access OSGB data in a flexible manner, thus creating business opportunity. Finally, BKG s Martin Lenk described GeoPortal.Bund, which will provide central entry to the National Data Infrastructure in Germany. This is taking place against a background of strong governmental support through IMAGI, founded in 1998, which operates at the governmental, conceptual and technical levels. GeoMIS.Bund addresses harmonisation of and entry to meta-information. GeoPortal.Bund addresses the stepwise harmonisation of feature catalogues and standard-based services (ISO 19xxx, OGC, egovernment SAGA 2.0), to be followed by a spiral implementation starting with pilot projects. These will serve reference data - topography (BKG) - and thematic data - environment (BfN, UBA), statistics (StBA), soil, geology (BGR), hydrology (WSV), rural information (ZADI), remote sensing (DFD) and climate (DWD). The tender for the project was awarded in Nov 2004, and first pilot demonstrations will be at CeBIT2005. The closing session began with a short presentation by Jörn Sievers on the EuroGeoNames (EGN) project which has just been initiated by BKG and the Dutchand German-speaking Division of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN). This will facilitate the integration of names data into NSDI s and ESDI, as required by EC services, translators and interpreters, tourism, news agencies. EGN will cover official names, endonyms (used in country) and exonyms (used in other countries) as well as historical names. Peter Woodsford then summarised the outputs from the Breakout Sessions as follows: Big variations exist in underlying business models, esp. between joint NMCA and separate NMA and CA Map serving is well established, using proprietary or open technologies

6 o How many are readily interoperable? o Is there a quick win linking interoperable web mapping services? Screen maps are largely free, for advertising, locating, and as a public service o Free as data is there is still the issue of liability Gazeteer capabilities are also important for discovery Feature serving still in early stages o uncertainty over charging o different data models o feature identity is a key topic Data models - issues in addition to structure are: o meaning, o agreement over minimum content, o quality information There is a strong desire to serve data to range of application schema o Means of adding value/distinguishing services o Schema translation important Charging mechanisms and DRM are hot topics o Designing charging in as an afterthought would be a mistake Crossborder issues are o delimitation of boundaries, and edge-matching o content o level of detail What is happening in the military MGCP? o avoid duplication of effort? o Security Technical infrastructure is a long term investment, business drivers are short term Some groups seem to have built distributed architectures successfully others seem to have problems o Perhaps the issue is cultural the will to collaborate? Public-private partnerships, do they exist?, do they work? He concluded by saying that two ideas had emerged for future Workshops: Business Models, including new technology developments o Linking Business School inputs, internal commercial policies and WPOS-DRM o This would fall in EuroGeographics domain Featuring Features o Definitions o Identifiers o Complex features o This would fall in EuroSDR s domain (Commissions 4 and 5). Finally, in pursuit of the Workshop s key deliverable, Manfred Endrullis presented the framework of the questionnaire under the headings of Services (Metadata Catalogue Service, Web Map Services, Web Feature Services), Digital Rights Management, Data Model, Schema Transformations and Pricing Model. Many suggestions for clarifications, extensions and deletions were offered from the audience and collated by Christiane Katterfeld. These are being consolidated under Manfred Endrullis into a questionnaire that will form a starting point for the

7 work of the Distributed Services Architecture and Information and Data Specifications Expert Groups. The questionnaire will receive a dry run before being put to all the NMA s and NMCA s in EuroGeographics. Notwithstanding jokes about design by committee, the pooling of the experience and insights of the Workshop participants should provide a firm foundation and hopefully avoid the if only we had asked that/ asked it that way post-questionnaire syndrome. The programme committee, formed from EuroSDR and EuroGeographics, are to be congratulated on bringing together an excellent set of presentations that stimulated lively debate and networking from a very active workshop group. Hosting arrangements and hospitality by BKG were excellent and much appreciated. Thanks are due particularly to Andreas Busch in this regard, and to all presenters and participants. We hope to report further on the questionnaire results in a future EuroSDR Newsletter and via the EuroGeographics website. Peter Woodsford President, EuroSDR Commission 5 and Chair of Workshop Programme Committee Cambridge, UK, 3 March 2005.