START Conference Manager |
(Submission #237)
Facts and circumstances
The evolving implementation of the INSPIRE Directive leads to a huge amount of metadata for spatial resources in Europe and their accessibility via various geoportals. One of the goals is to facilitate a central discoverability of spatial information. In parallel to this development many member states launched Open Data initiatives as their objectives are very similar. Central portals should be established to realise the access to distributed public sector information. In opposite to INSPIRE, at the beginning there were no international standards for modelling and exchanging such general public data metadata. In 2014 the W3C closes this gap by publishing a common RDF vocabulary as recommendation (DCAT). The standard was oriented towards the concrete information model of existing Open Data Portals. At this time more than 95% of such systems based on the Open Source Software CKAN, thus basically the CKAN information model had been standardized. Simultaneously a pan-European working group developed the so called DCAT Application profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP). This was initiated by CONNECT, DIGIT and the Publications Office of the European Union. The INSPIRE Directive and the resulting metadata were always focussed on and another working group in cooperation with JRC developed a mapping between DCAT-AP and the INSPIRE metadata elements. The result, an extension of DCAT-AP for describing geospatial metadata (GeoDCAT-AP), was published in august 2016. The group also developed and published a XSLT-script, which can be used to convert INSPIRE metadata into the GeoDCAT-AP RDF format.
Emerging issues
- Two competing metadata models (INSPIRE/ISO - DCAT/W3C)
- Missing mapping of standardized licence information in INSPIRE
- Insufficient semantic quality of spatial metadata (service coupling often is missing)
- Missing architectural concept for exchanging information between geo- and dataportals
- Political tendency to establish transparency portals (spatial data and Open Data are just two aspects amongst others)
Conclusion
To make the success of INSPIRE implementation transparent, it is crucial to integrate INSPIRE metadata into general data- and transparency portals. The development of DCAT-AP and the derived national profiles was just one step. In near future there will be a great demand for an integral e-Government metadata standard to exchange information of general public interest. The presentation compares different practical examples for integration of INSPIRE framework components in Open Data- and transparency portals.
Topic Area: [1.15] Other e-Government applications Abstract Type: Oral Presentation
Comments: egovernment,opendata,dcat,ckan,transparency,psi
[Workshop Description (PDF)]
START Conference Manager (V2.61.0 - Rev. 4840)