On 3-4 July 2019*, the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) will be hosting a workshop on making spatial data discoverable through mainstream search engines.
We are inviting web developers, spatial data publishers, and search engine optimisation (SEO) experts to share their experience related to search engines indexing optimisations when publishing spatial data. The call for participation is open until 10 May 2019.
Background: Search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques or the W3C/OGC Best Practices for Spatial Data on the Web are often not (fully) considered when developing Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). Therefore, the INSPIRE Maintenance and Implementation Group decided to launch a dedicated activity on making INSPIRE data discoverable through mainstream search engines. Google Dataset Search (GDS) workshop during the 2018 INSPIRE conference in Antwerp. The GDS workshop introduced the concept of annotating landing pages with code snippets that are recognised by Google crawlers ant thus indexed. This concept has been tested by several spatial dataset providers in Europe.
* The workshop has been moved back by one week to avoid a clash with the OGC TC meeting in Leuven.