Spanish national data infrastructure in the INSPIRE framework

Introduction: Spanish SDI and National Statistics Institute

The Geoportal of the Spanish National SDI (www.idee.es), opened in July 2004, to provide a basis for spatial data discovery, evaluation, and application for users and providers within all levels of government (national, regional and local), the private sector, academia and by citizens in general.

Nowadays, it has several developments according to the OGC specifications and ISO standards and it has covered successfully a first phase of development but the finish of this project isn’t near, there is still a lot of work to do.

From this Geoportal is possible to access to other Spanish SDI (IDEE) geoportales, consult information about this project and the SDI in general and use Applications Web that have been Implemented following the OGC specification:

A viewer with at least 50 Spanish Web Map Services (WMS) from national, regional and local level and from the universities that are integrated in the infrastructure, showing more than 700 layers reference and thematic information. For instance, with geographic and statistical data that is accessible through the NSDI. This viewer has also a Web Map Context integrated.

The Catalogue Service Web (CSW) support metadata for data publishing and searching related with information objects. The metadata conformant to ISO 19115, ISO 15836 Dublin Core Metadata and Spanish Core Metadata (a recommendation of High Geographic Council, based on a ISO19115 profile). In Spain there are 8 standard catalogues available on-line.

A Gazetteer implanted as a Web Feature Service (WFS) that retrieves the known geometries for one or more geographic names, nowadays we have a database of more than 400,000 geographical names., High Geographic Council has defined the Spanish Gazetteer Model according to ISO 19112 Geographic Identifiers, OGC Gaz specification, Alexandria Library Digital Project and other relevant

Web Feature Service allows the client display and download format several layers of information data encoded in Geography Mark-up Language (GML) from multiple Web Feature Services .

Web Coverage Service (WCS) analyzes a Digital Terrain Model and offers the possibility to obtain the highest, the lowest and the average altitude.

There are new technologies that are starting in Spanish SDI; A freeware application to PDA Platforms with WMS and Gaz and a tool with views in 2, 2.5 and 3 dimension perspective and three-dimensional flight with WCS and WMS.

The following steps of the Spanish National SDI project are: implement a Web Coordinate Transformation Service (WCTS) , a Web Processing Service (WPS) to calculate minimum route or slope with the data, a Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD) to specific the format of a map-styling , a service metadata catalogue to facilitate the services OGC searches and to increase the availability of the services SDI users. In this contribution we describe briefly the new technological lines of development and innovation already initiated to pursue our final goal: the SDI as a true GIS fully distributed and implemented on the Net.

In this presentation, we are going to use the WMS to view the geographic and statistical data:

The statistical data is from National Statistics Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estadística), Its mission is to elaborate and improve the current demographic, economic and social statistics, to work out new ones and to assure the co-ordination with the provincial and municipal statistical services.

As well as regular coordination between other statistical services such as the Special Statistical Services, the Act creates the High Council on Statistics. The National Statistics Institute is organised into central services, provincial delegations and delegations within the Ministries.

The National Statistics Plan is the main statistical activity computer tool of the State General Administration and is valid for four years.

The plan contains the statistics that must be developedin the four year period by the State General Administration's services or any other entity dependent on it and those statistics to be undertaken totally or in part with the participation of Autonomous Communities and local governments by virtue of cooperation agreements with state statistics services or, in turn, through the implementation of what is stated in law.

All statistics included in the National Statistics Plan are statistics for state purposes and are obligatory.

The Annual Programme contains those actions that must be carried out in the National Statistic Plan's operational year and the forecasts that, for this purpose, must be incorporated into the State's General Budget.

The National Statistics Plan is approved by royal decree and once approved, is carried out via the annual programmes that develop it and which are also approved by royal decree.

The organisation for the production of official statistics in Spain is very complex due to the decentralised system of statistical organisation in the General Administration of the State and the existence of autonomous community statistics systems.

The Spanish Constitution of 1978 establishes that the state has exclusive competence over statistics for state purposes. For its part, in the autonomous community autonomy statutes, approved by means of organic laws, it is established that each autonomous community has exclusive competence over statistics for autonomous community purposes.

Law 12/1989 of 9 May on Public Statistical Function represents the basic legal regulations for the exercise of statistical activity in the General Administration of the State. Here it is established that statistical function is carried out by: the National Statistics Institute, units from ministerial departments and any other public institutions depending on the General Administration of the State which have been given responsibility for such a function and the higher statistics council, to which must be added the Interministerial Statistics Commission and the Interterritorial Statistics Committee.

Similarly, autonomous communities have been enacting, or are in the process of enacting, their respective statistics laws in which the exercise of statistical activity in the autonomous community is regulated and the statistics institute and advisory bodies for autonomous statistics are created.

If you are looking for statistical data to get to know and analyse the economic, demographic and social situation you have chosen the most complete and current information source. In www.ine.es all the statistical data coming from the latest censuses, statistics and research based on surveys elaborated by the INE are available (INEbase). You will also find a large quantity of information coming from other Spanish and international sources. All technologies in www.ine.es is free.

Fundaments and objectives of IDEE

As it was already described in several forums and according to the objectives and conception of the INSPIRE initiative, the aims to be achieved by the implementation of the Spanish SDI can be summarised in 4 different points:

Making easy that governments can share their geographical information in an effective way in order to avoid redundant efforts, recover the investments and ensure that each user employs a common kernel of basic geographical data, the so called “reference data”

Contributing to e-government initiatives, so that each activity that uses maps or cartographic data can be made automatic without the spatial information being a problem.

Making accessible for the citizens all the geographical information managed by the government through free SDI services, at least those related to the gazetteer and the visualization.

One last goal is bringing spatial data infrastructures to private sector and ordinary people, not only allowing access to geographical data and services but also offering the option of publishing their own spatial data, and services, in the IDEE. This information needs to fulfil some minimal requirements related to normalization and harmonization and it will also be distinguished from reference data which will be maintained by an official organism.

The IDEE project is compliant with the philosophy and guidelines of the INSPIRE directive proposal, with the OGC specifications and with the ISO family of standards. It also follows those initiatives, projects and laws that promote the free flow of information and admit the right of citizens to access data managed by public institutions:

- Directive 2003/98/EC on the re-use of public sector information

- Aarhus convention that establishes the citizens’ rights to access to governmental information related to the environment and participation in the decision-making.

- Open Access Initiative of Budapest, signed by more than 200 universities, libraries and investigation centers all over the world, which promotes the electronic publication in investigation magazines of the results and conclusions delivered by investigation projects through faster mechanism than those used by traditional magazines.

- Open Archives Initiative focused on defining standards to provide interoperable and easily accessible files and metadata catalogues with scientific documentation in order to contribute to the information flow.

According to Jimmy Wales’1 words, our last aim is to provide to every person some kind of simple GIS, which at least allows searching and visualising the available geographical data, using an ordinary internet connection and a browser (soft client).

Two other ways of working were also considered:

- Those demanding complex analysis, in other words, local GIS software that uses OGC services (heavy clients)

- Activities where the downloading of geographical data is needed in order to process it locally (very heavy clients)

These three different clients make possible to the user to select the most appropriate method to their necessities.

We are aware that these activities could seem to be against the copyrights of this information. However several authors have expressed their doubts about it. On the one hand, they question the existence of those rights due to the fact we are talking about cartographic data which are just a representation of facts and reality is not under this type of rights, and, on the other hand, they question also if a government can have copyright of data collected during its ordinary activity which has been financed by the citizens their selves.

1 Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia.

The real problem is that there is a large amount of organizations that generate cartography and geographical data according to a financing model based on sales, and consequently the process to change this situation would demand the modification of many laws, statutes and normative, what would surely turn out to be a long, complex and hard process.

Notwithstanding, it should be considered that the proposal of the INSPIRE directive recommends the implementation of free catalogue, gazetteer and visualization services, and it also makes possible the downloading of free, low-cost or even commercial data, what provides high flexibility to be adapted to the situation of each member country and sector.

SDI organisation

Spanish Spatial Data Infrastructure (IDEE) has been coordinated by the National Geographic Council (Consejo Superior Geográfico, CSG), a governmental body, which committed its Geomatic Commission to define this project. In the CSG are represented all the digital geographic data producers (in INSPIRE sense), national and autonomic organisms (National Geographic Institute, Environment Ministry, Agriculture Ministry, Army Mapping Services, Autonomic Communities Services….) whose presidency and technical secretary is done by the National Geographic Institute.

The CSG defined in November 2002 a working group for the Spanish SDI, as an open group to any relevant actors (Public Administration: national, regional, local, universities and private companies…) for the interchange of ideas and experiences and for the establishment of rules and agreements, in form of recommendations, needed for implementing an SDI in Spain, open and efficient, following the INSPIRE recommendations and the interoperability specifications of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), formerly Open GIS Consortium.

The main recommendations established within the SDI Working Group are:

- The Spanish Core Metadata (NEM), version 1.1, as a minimum item set of recommended metadata, defined as an ISO19115 profile, that comprises the core of such ISO 19115, besides the necessary items to take into account Dublin Core Metadata, the metadata seen in the Frame Directive of water and quality description.

- A NEM v1.0 user guide that establishes the basic criteria to fill in the NEM fields

- A minimum recommended services to implement any SDI that tries to be integrated in the SDI, and that basically includes a catalogue, a web map service (WMS) and a Gazetteer.

- Establishment of directives about architecture that define the role that every component must play on its field of work and the corresponding hieratical responsibilities to ensure that there is no “shadow areas” in the SDI running.

- Spanish Gazetteer Model (MNE) version 1.1, as a common data model for the geographic names that are going to be used for the Gazetteer services, with the

advantages that brings for harmonization, interchange and distributed management of geographic names.

- Implementation recommendations of WMS services, where a basic set or criteria is fixed , as a common and standard nomenclature for all the first level layers, a common Coordinate System that is recommended….

Current status of the project

The IDEE geoportal (see figure 1) was opened in the summer of 2004 and it’s based on software developed by the University of Zaragoza in the framework of an agreement with the IGN (Instituto Geográfico Nacional). It offers 5 different OGC services:

- Web Map Service (WMS)

- Catalogue Service Web (CSW)

- Gazetteer Service (WFS-MNE)

- Web Map Context (WMC)

- Web Feature Service (WFS)

- Web Coverage Service (WCS)

Figure 1 Geoportal IDEE (Spanish SDI), www.idee.es

It integrates more than 28 servers and allows access to more than 560 information layers, provided by national, regional and local agencies, universities, private enterprises …

Its interface has been translated into five different languages (Spanish, English, Basque, Catalan and Galician) and it is also planned to include French and Portuguese versions to facilitate the interoperation with neighbouring countries.

Available dataThrough easily embeddable WMS services, it is possible to access to the visualization and consulting of a large amount of data with different origins, subjects and resolutions (see figure 2)

In a national level we dispose of:

- The national cartographical databases of the Instituto Geográfico Nacional with scales 1:1,000,000, 1:200,000 and 1:25,000, and also DTM, additional data (grids, administrative division and geodesic vertexes), thematic data (Corine-Land Cover, maps of geomagnetism, seismology and gravimetry) and most of the Spanish national atlas.

- Cadastre of almost the whole national territory with scales 1:1,000 and 1:500 for urban cadastre and 1:5,000 and 1:2,000 for rural one, published in Internet by the Cadastre for the whole Spain, except for Navarra and Basque Country both of which have the responsibility to publish this data in their own web map services.

- Information of the geologic map of Spain with scale 1:1,000,000 developed by the Mining and Geological Institute.

- Statistical units under the municipal level (census districts and sections) produced and maintained by the National Statistics Institute.

- Before ending of current year 2006, it is foreseen to open the SDIs of Ministry of Public Works and Ministry of Environment and the Fondo Europeo de Garantía Agraria (FEGA) is considering the possibility of publishing the SIGPAC orthophotos, which cover the whole Spain with a one-meter resolution and even a half-a-meter.

In a regional level there exist several initiatives which have already been implemented, or will shortly be, consisting of interoperable services and also geoportals and SDI developed by the regional governments of Catalonia, Basque Country, La Rioja, Galicia, Castilla y Leon, Valencia, Castilla-La Mancha, Andalusia and Murcia. Anyway, each autonomous region is working in this type of initiatives.

Figure 2. Examples of superposition, IGN cartography about regional cartography.

In a local level there are examples that can be mentioned like the SDIs of the town halls of Zaragoza (IDEZAR) and Pamplona, or the local SDI project of Catalonia which in its first phase integrates 50 municipalities. Moreover a large amount of town halls are about to open their own geoportals.

In a thematic level, there exist several applications and geoportals that use interoperable services and employ already existing WMS or publish their reference data: the Climatologic Atlas of the Iberian penninsula created by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the SDI of coastlines that is integrated in the Catalonian SDI, the SDI of the national park of Doñana, the geoportal of IMEDEA (Instituto Mediterráneo de Estudios Avanzados) of the government of Balears, the project Anthos of the real botanic garden of Madrid, the geoportal of the botanic garden of Lisbon, the thematic atlas of distribution of birds, and many other projects that appear day by day in every single sector and which are bringing the SDI technology to almost each area of the human activity.

Basic Services. Geoportal IDEE offers three SDI Basic services, Map Service in the Web (WMS 1.1.0), Gazetteer (WFS with MNE) and Catalogue Service in the Web (CSW 2.0), integrated in a viewer that allows its linking of transparent way for the user.

IDEE Geoportal viewer, presents in addition some interesting functionalities:

- To print the cartography that it is seen at every moment in screen, using a standard frame, certain marginal information (legend, title, scale and wind rose) and a message that informs into the origin of the data.

- To keep the image that is being in the viewer in a while determined in a different formats that it includes the most used (JPG, PNG, GIF).

- To superpose to a Maps Service (WMS) of which we know its URL or one of the defined by defect in the qualified menu to add servers.

- To modify the Reference System and Projection in which each server WMS offers the cartography, choosing one between that offers the server.

- Functionalities for a perfect visualization of superposed WMS services: to modify the service style or a layer, choosing between opaque, transparent and semitransparent; and to modify the priority of visualization between the active WMS, choosing which is had to see above and which more down.

On the other hand, in IDEE is offered a Services Catalogue that works of very simple way, although not according to any OGCo specification: simply it shows in screen an inventory of the available services and its main characteristics, getting on-the-fly, with the GetCapabilities function, information about each service registered in a list. (http://www.idee.es/recursos/servicios).

Finally, the IDEE Geoportal has a footbridge that allows to superpose some basic WMS service, a Base Map, with the images that the application of visualization Google Earth offers, that has been developed by an expert of Cadastre. It is a no standard solution.

Additional services. Beyond the three basic and fundamental services for a Spatial data Infrastructure, IDEE Geoportal presents the implementation of other services and applications that carry out OGC standards, always linked with at least another Geoportal service:

Web Map Context (WMC), that allows to store a file in XML format where all the parameters are colleted (invoked services, visualization scope, actives links, uses Reference,..) of a session in a moment determined, so that the state of the session can be reconstructed in all its details at another moment. In addition to the being according to the standard, it is possible to load the state of the session in another viewer that it has implemented that functionality according to WMC

Web Feature Service (WFS), in our case oriented to the data unload, offer the free and open obtaining in GML (Geographic Markup Language) format of:

- Geodesic points of the different national geodesic networks.

- A database from all Spain on scale 1:1.000.000, that constitutes the Spanish contribution to the EGM (euro Global Map) European project, that integra data from all Europe on that scale.

- Spanish administrative units geometry (autonomous region, provinces and towns) on three scales, 1:1.000.000, 1:200.000 and 1:25.0000.

The objective is to make free available of users, developer and data producers, the geographic data of reference more used, so that they can be used as common control base,

that soon it allows to cross information of different projects thanks to that the basic geometric reference frame is the same one.

CORINE Analysis application, application that allows to carry out a remote analysis on line, certainly elementary, of Corine-Land Cover map, based on a Web Feature Service (WFS). The application allows to visualize the different levels from detail that includes Corine-Land Cover project of a specific municipality, to visualize the changes produced from the first version (1990) to the effective one (2000), and to obtain a statistic of the percentage of town surface occupied by a type or more of cover. The interest of this elementary application of superficial analysis is that it is based on the standard WFS and that makes analysis in real time (to see figure 3).

Digital Terrain Model, DTM. Analysis application, another simple example of on line analysis made on IGN DTM 1:200,000, using the standard Web Coverage Service (WCS). The application allows visualizing the DTM by means of a hypsometric legend and when the visualization scale is greater of 1:100.000, it is possible to analyze the DTM data in the scope of visualization and to obtain the highest altitude, the lowest altitude and average value. Like in the case before mentioned, the main of this application, it is that it is an example of remote superficial analysis.

Figure 3 Visualization of changes 1990-2000 in the Corine-Land Cover

Cadastral maps Temporal Service. Cadastre has implemented a maps service WMS that admits the TIME parameter in the form YY-MM-DD; the Geoportal viewer is able to make successive calls to that service specifying two different dates, and offers a superposition of the maps resulting to the user, with which it is possible to make a visual analysis of the changes happened in the time elapsed.

Google Earth Footbridge. IDEE is, in addition, able to interoperate with the Google Earth viewer, although is not a OGC standard viewer. Using this tool, developed by an expert of Cadastre, is possible to superpose a standards service WMS with the Google Hear layers, and like example, in IDEE Geoportal has individual free unloading plug-in that allow the superposition using Cadastre Map Services and IGN Basic cartography.

Conclusion

The installation and use of the technology provided by spatial data infrastructures, especially in case of a national SDI, like IDEE, demand a paradigm change in terms of geographic information management and utilization. It should also become widely known by allowing the georeferencing of all the needed information in order to make the right decisions.

Working with the geographic information that is located in the IDEE environment makes possible to simplify the localization, access and use of data produced by different actors. Moreover, it makes easier those services based on this type of information and, above all, it

lays the foundations for the creation of lots of services based on the data or on previously existing services.

Once it is set up and operative, the organisational aspects of a SDI simplify amazingly because it regulates itself based on some rules and protocols. It should also be considered the management and utilization cost decrease that involves the interoperable access to data and services in such an infrastructure.

IDEE is a cooperative project developed through the participation of organisms and institutions of national, regional and local governments and also universities and private sector.

This wide range of geographic information, together with the functionalities provided by SDI technologies, opens new possibilities, which are very interesting for those specialist, technician and investigators that work with cartography. The utility of this type of systems hasn’t been exploited yet.

Additionally, it is necessary to improve the quality of those services provided in the IDEE Geoportal, taking each aspect into account: usability, accessibility, availability, stability and performance. In an SDI, the service is the main concept and its quality a key factor on which the project image depends and consequently its success.

The lesson learnt in the IDEE project is that “if you share, you gain more” as it is said in Fernando Trias and Alex Rovira’s book “La buena suerte”. That is, talking about spatial data infrastructures, sharing is something very positive for each involved actor.

References

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José Luís Ródenas, National Statistics Institute, SpainAntonio Rodriguez Pascual, National Geographic Institute, SpainJosé Ángel Alonso Jimenez, National Geographic Institute, SpainPaloma Abad Power, National Geographic Institute, SpainAlejandra Sánchez Maganto, National Geographic Institute, Spain