INSPIRE MIGMinutes of the 2ndMIG tele-/web-conference, 14 January 2014
INSPIRE Maintenance and Implementation Group (MIG)
Minutes of the 2ndMIG tele-/web-conference,
14 January 2014
Creator / Michael Lutz
Creation Date / 2014-01-27
Date of last revision / 2014-01-27
Subject / 2ndMIG tele-/web-conference
Publisher / European Commission – Joint Research Centre
Type / Text
Description / Minutes of the 2ndMIG tele-/web-conference, 14 January 2014
Contributor / Robin Smith
Format / Microsoft Word (docx)
Rights / Public
Identifier /
Language / En
Preface
The minutes are based on the notes taken in the web-conference chat window by the scribe (Robin Smith) as well as comments made by participants in the chat.
Where “+1” is used in the minutes, this is to indicate support for the position of the previous speaker.
Actions are indicated in the minutes using the keyword [Action]and are summarised in the following section.
Open Actions
No. / Action / Responsible / Due / Done4 / Propose working methods, procedures and tools / EC / 30/11/2013
11 / Inform about AOB points by e-mail / JRC, EEA / 6/12/2013 / x
12 / Send to JRC (Robin and Michael) any best practices etc. that may be useful for the ARE3NA AAA study / all / 7/2/2014
13 / Send to JRC (Robin and Michael)references to any existing work / best practices (including projects) that may be relevant for the ARE3NA study on RDF and PIDs for location/INSPIRE data. / all / 7/2/2014
14 / Organise a teleconference with FR and DE later in January on MIWP-5 / JRC / 29/1/2014 / x
15 / Share outcomes and presentations of INSPIRE Registries and registers workshop / JRC / 7/2/2014 / x
16 / Nominate members for a MIG sub-group to work on MIWP-16 / MIG representatives / 15/1/2014 / x
17 / Provide comment on the Draft Maintenance and Implementation Work Programme / MIG representatives / 31/1/2014 / x
18 / Draft proposal to be shared with the MIG for an additional work programme task on licensing and data and service sharing. / EEA / 31/1/2014 / x
19 / Make a version of Redmine available for testing and provide documentation / JRC / 31/1/2014
20 / Propose tools for wiki, collaborative authoring of documents and document management / JRC / 15/2/2014
21 / Publish MIG ToR on the INSPIRE web site / JRC / 31/1/2014 / x
22 / Draft an additional work programme task on XML schema maintenance (process and concrete advice on specific updates). / JRC / 31/1/2014
23 / Propose members for a sub-group on XML schema maintenance / MIG representatives / 7/2/2014
24 / Provide feedback on whether the MIG minutes should be made available:
- publicly on the INSPIRE website
- only to MIG members and observers, or
- only to MIG members
25 / Set up a call on publishing the metadata of the INSPIRE Geoportal in the pan-EU Open Data portal / JRC / 31/1/2014
26 / Share relevant events with the group / all / continuous
27 / Indicate your availability for the next MIG tele-/web-conferences in the doodle polls at (February ) and (March). / all / 5/2/2014 / x
28 / Discuss division of roles between MIG and INSPIRE Committee at the face-to-face meeting in April / all / 10/4/2014
29 / Prepare a separate agenda item on the GEMET update for the next meeting / EEA / 10/2/2014 / x
30 / Promote the survey for public consultation on the implementation of the INSPIRE Directive (deadline: 24 February): / MIG representatives / 24/2/2014
1Welcome and approval of the agenda
Michael welcomed the participants. The following agenda was approved:
- Welcome and approval of the agenda9:30 – 9:40
- Minutes of the previous meeting (for discussion and agreement)9:40 – 9:50
- Draft rolling work programme – Status of individual tasks
(for information)9:50 – 10:10 - Tools (for information)10:10 – 10:30
- Issue tracker
- Annex I schema updates (for discussion and agreement)10:30 – 10:50
- Technical issues
- Process (see e-mail by Clemens Portele)
- Next steps
- Observer status for other organisations and projects
(for discussion and agreement)10:50 – 11:00 - Publishing the metadata of the INSPIRE Geoportal in the pan-EU Open
Data portal (for discussion and agreement)11:00 – 11:10 - Upcoming events (for information)11:10 – 11:15
- AOB11:15 – 11:30
- Role of MIG in “policy issues” like draft Directive on Marine Spatial Planning
- “Linking geospatial data” Workshop, 5-6 March 2014, London
- Update of GEMET – need and priority
2Minutes of the previous meeting
The revised minutes of the meeting (as distributed before the meeting) were adopted without additional comments.
3Draft rolling work programme – Status of individual tasks
3.1Activities under the Tasks
Task / ActivityMIWP-1 / No major progress
MIWP-2 / (Action mainly on JRC/EC/EEA team)- no major progress
MIWP-3 / Alex Ramage (UK) reported that Chris Higgins (EDINA, University of Edinburgh) is happy to contribute to work on Topic 3 (Access Control).
Robin (JRC): Eurogeographics hosted a number of presentations on access control/AAA as part of their INSPIRE Knowledge Exchange Network, all publicly available on their website[1], including a JRC in December outlining the work to take place under ARE3NA.
The study has been awarded to a consortium led by Geosparc, including also Univ. of Leuven, SecureDimensions and IDGis. The study will not only look at geospatial access control technologies but also e-government examples.
The kick-off meeting will take place later this week (16/01/2014)
[Action] Clare Hadley (OS GB, UK) has provided relevant input. From the call, Markus (AT) noted descriptions of access and security system will be provided. Please send to Robin and Michael any other best practices etc. that you think may be useful for the study
MIWP-4 / Work will led by Deloitte with support from Univ. of Leuven
Kick-off meeting for the RDF and Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) study will be this week (17/01/2014)
Workshop in March in London may be important to present intermediate results.
Experts will be involved for proposing different candidate methods for RDF/PIDs best practices.
[Action] Again, please provide Robin and Michael with details of any existing work / best practices (including projects) that you are involved in for either RDF or PIDs (including their governance) related to location/INSPIRE
MIWP-5 / DE will not take whole lead but will prepare the workshop with FR
[Action] The JRC will organise a teleconference with FR and DE later in January
MIWP-6 / The Re3gistry/INSPIRE Registry workshop is scheduled for next week (22-23 January 2014).
Several Member States are participating, including 5-10 minute presentations about their developments/plans. The EEA and Publications Office will present register-related work, too. Some of the discussion will involve connecting national and INSPIRE (central) Registry, updates to the central registry and other technical interoperability issues. The (re)use of registers across sectors, beyond INSPIRE, in several organisations will also be discussed
[Action] The JRC will make workshop outputs available
MIWP-7 / An ARE3NA study will investigate how to use Sensor Observation Services as INSPIRE download services for observation data. Work on this topic has been awarded to 52 North and a project plan will soon be delivered to the JRC
A Spring/Summer workshop is planned to look at WCS and table join services. The UK and the NL will help organise the workshop
MIWP-8 / No major progress
MIWP-9 / Planning for the geoportal workshop should take place in January. This could be co-organised with Monitoring and Reporting activities (currently being discussed with DGENV and EEA)
MIWP-10 / There was some feedback from EEA on the PS data specification, which has been incorporated. For the remaining Annex I themes, it was agreed to publish the current versions as they are now.
MIWP-11 & 12 / Christine Giger (CH/LI) reported the organisation will start next week (20 January onwards), with support from Michel Grothe (NL).
MIWP-13 / No major progress. Awaiting set-up of issue tracker for the specifications.
MIWP-14 / (Linked to Task 13)Discussion took place between JRC, EEA and DGENV in December. Main progress is a more detailed task description. The first step will be to contact some potential organisations to help facilitate work with the different communities.
JRCwill set up a space/forum where such discussions could take place
MIWP-15 / Some questionnaires will be due in the near future
MIWP-16 / [Action] MIG invited to nominate members. A phone conference will be scheduled for next week based on the availability of nominees. Please provide details to Paul (EEA): .
3.2Comments on the WP
[Action] Comments on the Work Programme are due by the end of January. MIG members are encouraged to consult widely.
National consultations have started in some countries (AT, DE, FI, NL, NO, PT, SE, SK & UK reported). Alex Coley (UK) the UK’s Architecture Board will be reviewing it but initial feedback indicated that challenges are likely from the level of work and inter-dependencies. Markus Jobst (AT) noted AT will focus on two actions (MIWP-3 and MIWP-8).
Christina (SE) added that awareness had been raised but more time is needed to nominate people for actions. JRC indicated that interest can be indicated by a country in a task if someone could be available, with specific names coming later. Ideally, the Pool of experts should be used and if new people are nominated for tasks, these should ideally be registered in the pool. If the geographical spread and spread in expertise is not well balanced for the tasks, then the pool of experts will be used.
The MIG is encouraged to visit the INSPIRE website to see the pool of experts (), which allows individuals to be filtered, based on their areas of expertise or country of origin.
Nathalie (BE) asked if there is a scheduling problem between the consultation on the work programme and the on-going nomination of experts for some of the tasks. JRC acknowledged that there is a slight overlap at the moment between some tasks and the finalising of the programme, but that some tasks need to be started as soon as possible (as outlined at the October meeting for monitoring and reporting).
For task MIWP-16, MIG members are requested to nominate those currently responsible and already involved in monitoring and reporting and to put themselves in the work programme as a 'placeholder' until a hand over to nominees take place.
3.3Other possible tasks and topics
Darja (EEA) wondered if data and service sharing could be added to the work programme, including INSPIRE licencing models (linking to MIWP tasks 1, 3 or 5). The work under ARE3NA only will identify some technologies for licencing and will not look into this topic in detail. Alex Coley (UK) noted that licences are quite contentious and that the right experts need to be involved (including proposals to involve Clare Hadley (OS GB), Chris Jarvis (Environment Agency) plus someone from the National Archive). Martin (SK) suggested linking this with the wider data-sharing discussion, including creating a mock-up of a licencensing framework based on the recent conclusions of the PSI Directive guidelines consultation[2].
[Action] It is proposed that EEA puts in a formal proposal to be shared with the MIG for an additional work programme task on licensing and data and service sharing, including the possibility for a workshop.
4Tools: Issue Tracker
Chris (JRC) presented an implementation of the Redmine (open source, ) system for project management.
The tools include issue tracking, role-based access control, notifications/feeds and time tracking as main features (main roles are developer and reporter). It is also possible to declare issues and comments as private, so that they cannot be seen by anonymous (i.e. not logged in) users. Anonymous users will be able to see all (non-private) issues, but users need to be logged in to provide comments and participate in issue resolution.
The workflow is fairly simple and Redmine allows developing our own workflow for tracking. Issues can be split/classified by maintenance tasks. Details of the issues can be filtered to easily find, track and work on them. A chart gives an overview of your issues and where they are in the workflow (which can be moved around to change their status).
Only reporters can add issues, with some abilities overlapping with developers.
Redmine is already used in BG, CH, DE, UK and EEA.
[Action] JRC will make a version available for testing soon and will provide documentation.
Paul (EEA) asked if it would be possible to filter by working group? JRC noted that this could be an option or we could set up different projects for each task, as well as a common project. He also asked if there were plans to support document editing. The wiki is not very user friendly, it does not have a Google doc-like functionality. Subversion could be better for sharing documents. This was used in the past during the development of the INSPIRE technical guidelines and was working well.
[Action] JRC will look into this and possible co-authoring tools, too.
Carlo (IT) asked if there were any plans for a Member State repository? JRC noted that this was not discussed in detail but an open source tool was chosen so it could be reused without paying licence fees and by setting up the same system on other servers (JRC can share configuration details). JRC can also look at hosting an instance for a Member State at the JRC but this approach should be minimised as much as possible due to maintenance tasks for different projects.
Martin (SK) asked if there are any plans to make the MIG Terms of Reference publicly available to allow references to be made from national INSPIRE webpages, as well as providing background information for the MIG Work Programme consultation at country level. The MIG agreed that this information should be kept open.
[Action] JRC will publish the ToR on the INSPIRE web site.
5Annex I schema updates
Some proposed changes to the schemas were made before the holidays, including changes to candidates/placeholders replaced by Annex II and III themes, especially in the Hydrography theme and cases in Buildings and other themes. Additional models and minor changes took place. There were not many changes overall but these need to be reflected in the schemas. Maintaining compliance with the old versions is also needed, where namespaces are maintained to guarantee backwards compatibility for old XML files that were created based on the current schemas. Deprecation needs to take place to make sure datasets that use deleted elements are still valid, even according to the new schemas.
Comments circulated via e-mail before the meeting from experts (e.g. Clemens Portele) indicate the need for a strategy for now and in the future as these changes can impact on implementation software and not knowing how software will be updated to the new version.
There is a need to coordinate with software developers and data providers about some changes to ensure implications of changes are kept to a minimum, that people are informed and plans made about how to migrate. It is suggested that changes should not take place now but that communication about them can begin.
Legally, schemas need to be changed as soon as possible but JRC recognises the effort needed to implement changes. There is also a need for testing and demonstrating that proposed changes do work, showing the benefits of the new version before version approval.
We need to decide when a dataset is still compliant if it is being updated (an issue of timing, too). Ilkka Rinne pointed out that we do not know if there are bugs as we are currently at a low level of implementation and there is a feeling that some are awaiting the final version. This is not recommended as the testing and reporting of bugs is needed to aid implementation. Overall, there is a suggestion to establish a development and release process, including components mentioned in the slides: acceptance, versioning, corrigenda etc. and who should be involved in communication issues
Similarly, Sylvain Gellet's comments asked if an update should be postponed until there is a strategy. Again, communication was seen as important between software and reality, as stating which version of INSPIRE you are compliant with should be avoided. A question was raised if Annex II and III are stable enough and that, if there is any postponement, as with any update now, clear communication is vital, with timelines shared with all stakeholders.
Annex II and III should be published by the end of January. Technical comments in proposals should have been received by all and the next steps need to be discussed. JRC asked if we could get some insights from current European projects. It was, therefore, proposed to have a subgroup on schema management: focusing on a strategy on schema update (following expert input) and how to have a release/migration plan (relating to compliance and deadlines etc.). This should aim to uncover bugs, too. This would be added to the work programme and would have people working on it as soon as possible. The group could be seen as a committee for any proposals, closely working with the work programme’s GML experts. The INSPIRE community, in general, needs to be informed of issues and plan to have a formal strategy and process, including how and where they can submit any issues that they uncover.
Alex C (UK) suggested publishing as soon as possible and that the change process description is important, as people need to avoid taking the position of not using models because they were waiting for a final version. Alex agreed with the JRC that the two issues should not be linked.