The Italian Geological Geoportal: an example of INSPIRE thematic framework

C. Cipolloni, V. Campo, M.P. Congi, D. Delogu, M. Roma, R. Ventura, C. Zonetti

Geological Survey of Italy - ISPRA, Roma, Italy

The Geological Survey of Italy (ISPRA) has improved the Geoportal that carries out as access point to Italian Geoscience community; to do the new version of Geoportal the main aim has been the integration within the International Standard e.g. INSPIRE, OGC,GeoSciML specific for the Geological community.

The Geoportal architecture is composed by a metadata catalogue where is stored in several metadata profiles specific for dataset and services, in particular have been implemented the INSPIRE standard profile and the italian standard profile named RNDT (Law 32) edited by DigitPA (before CNIPA) to respond at national level to the INSPIRE directive.

The metadata catalogue was build compliant to a OCG catalogue service in CSW 2.0.2 AP ISO (OGC, 2007). All the metadata files produced by the Geological Survey of Italy were compiled in Italian language and a lot of these are also in English.

To simplify the research in the Geoportal, in the metadata title is present also the metadata profile acronym standard and two letter that identified the language, for example: “geologia_1M_INSPIRE_IT”.

The Geoportal has been designed to have an accessible facilities provided to the web services and a wider choice of services available in a specific portal section, mainly in OGC standard, like WMS (more than 40?), WFS, WCS and KML, but also in a common commercial standard i.e. ArcGIS Server and ArcIMS. At the moment more than 50 different services are published.

The use of multiple web map services is due to maintain at the national level high standard in the symbolization of the map using the symbol libraries based on the cartographic guidelines of the Geological Survey of Italy.

In the Geological geoportal we take in high consideration also the harmonization at the European level, in fact there are specific section dedicated to two international projects that highlight the role of a unique standard data model for geological information.

In particular the Geological Survey is partner of Interoperability working group of the IUGS-CGI that has developed the geological data model (GeoSciML – Geoscience Mark-up Language) and the encoding language for the geological information. This model is based on an extension of the GML language and, at the moment, exist three major release: version 2.1.1, that it’s the data model candidate for INSPIRE data specification Annex II.4 (Theme Geology, JRC 2008), and two different release version 3.0 based on the two version of GML language (3.1.1 and 3.2.1- OGC, 2003; 2007b).

The other important international project, originated with the aim that try to harmonize data content and data structure, using also GeoSciML version 2.1.1, is the OneGeology-Europe project (more information is available at URL: http://www.onegeology-europe.eu) where using 17 different vocabularies of geological terms and a unique client build to able to respond at the GeoSciML language request, apply at European level, was possible an harmonization of many geological maps on a scale of 1:1.000.000.

Both these project are part of the geoportal and in the WFS section there are examples such as the service in GeoSciML language and also the potentiality offered by these. In particular we using two different frontend framework to convert the request and the response of the server, using GeoSciML language schema. The first type of application has been build in Cocoon (Apache foundation software) and uses a series of xlst files to match the local database schema at the standard data model. The other application arrives from the OneGeology-Europe project and is developed in Java, specifically to match in a flexible way the local terms and database at the GeoSciML data contents.

In the next year we will try to apply the OneGeology-Europe methodology to harmonize in detail the regional geological data, using a centralize java connector to compose a web map service puzzle.

Another important goal for the future is the application, when JRC will publish the data model for Data Specification Annex III, to build specific framework to match our landslide and natural resources data at the standard data model.

JRC 2008 – Drafting Team "Data Specifications" – deliverable D2.6: Methodology for the development of data specifications, D2.6_v3.0-doc. http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/reports/ImplementingRules/DataSpecifications/D2.6_v3.0.pdf

OGC 2003 – OpenGIS® Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard version 3.1.1., doc- 03-105r1, http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=4700.

OGC 2007 - OpenGIS® Catalogue Services Specification version 2.0.2, doc-OGC 07-006r1, http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=20555.

OGC 2007b - OpenGIS® Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard version 3.2.1., doc-OGC 07-036, http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=20509.