Geospatial Standards – Experiences for the UK Academic Community Workshop on Grid Middleware and Geospatial Standards for Earth System Science Data, National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh, Sept 2005 Chris Higgins

Part of the Data Library, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Designated a national datacentre in 1995 EDINA's mission... to enhance the productivity of research, learning and teaching in UK higher and further education Bibliographic and Geodata services Undertake R&D  service EDINA

Importance of standards to the academic community (1) Which of the following do you believe to be the single greatest benefit offered by approved standards in software development?

National datacentre engagement with the concept of a UK academic Spatial Data Infrastructure: Policies and institutional agreements Data Technology and standards Ability to find geo-related resources Means of accessing data Tools to enable use of the data Importance of standards for the academic community (2)

© 2004 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. Data Web Services SDI for the UK Academic Community

Ordnance Survey Digimap

EuroGlobalMap

GoGeo!

Agreement with the OS that can make data available as web services to other JISC services Possibility of direct access by students and researchers Trial service - WMS into desktop GIS Security a key issue so Digimap users only Big questions about capacity Web Services Agreement with the Ordnance Survey

SDI courses beginning to be taught, eg, Muenster, Delft, Utrecht, Wageningen, ITC, Jaume I, New Brunswick Any SDI courses in the UK? Opportunity to bring relevant research into the standards process: Strengthen the ability of University members to contribute to innovation in interoperability and to help improve the quality of both the existing and future work force needed to support national and global spatial data infrastructures (OGC University WG Charter, 2004) Increasingly graduates will be employing these standards in their work Valid research topic in own right? JISC Interoperability Study Importance of standards to the UK academic community (3)

JISC Interoperability Study Objectives: prove the feasibility of delivering geo- spatial data using OGC standards; demonstrate ease of use and value added; build support and enthusiasm for further development; stimulate and advance further thinking identify major hurdles in full development.

JISC Interoperability Study - deliverables A range of OGC based web services (WMS;WFS;WCS) A basic annotation web service (XIMA) Use cases realised: –Datacentre. Access to data –Teaching (urban expansion) –Research (dynamic image registration using web services) A report on the utility and issues surrounding implementation of open standards for geospatial data within UK academic sector, including an assessment of security and access authorisation issues

JISC Interoperability Study

More work required than possibly initially anticipated (though overheads with modern tools is less significant than was required previously e.g. MMS) Differences in underlying technologies may impact upon the degree of support for ‘standards’ (open source vs commercial) Security and DRM issues barely addressed – how do OGC ‘web services’ map into mainstream Web Services – what about WS-Security…longer term where does e- Research and GGF approaches to security fit in? Interoperability by definition assumes a minimum of 2 endpoints – providing the services themselves is only half the story! Still early days… JISC Interoperability Study – preliminary conclusions

Technologies Datasets Hydrographic Historic Other JISC services Desktop Plug-ins Contexts Google Earth Spatial Data Infrastructures (INSPIRE Europe) JISC e-framework Programme SOA/Web services GRID Open standards Data supply Map supply New services Software Hardware Data harmonisation Growth in use and users Changing user needs (& expectations) GPS/LBS DNF OS Data Geology OSNI File based Object based ???? (GML) (XMML) (MarineXML) (GML?) (File server -> database) Shibboleth Future - A Common Architecture

Future – infrastructures everywhere JISC e-Framework UK academic SDI JISC Information Environment e-Infrastructure

Initiatives taken to date: Dec 2003 – 2 day workshop at NIEeS June 2004 OGC TC Southampton – ad hoc Grid meeting under Earth Observation WG July 2004 – formation of GridGIS WG Where next? Under investigation – making OGC services available under OGSA-DAI. A collaboration between NeSC and EDINA. Contact: Future - Grid and OGC