SDI Convergence - Nederlandse Commissie voor Geodesie - KNAW

domain are or may become important players in SDI communities. This may result in
initiatives that combine global challenges such as examining the relation between climate
change and national security (see CAN, 2007).
2
“When the walls are down, the bridges can be build”
(Jesse Jackson, April 11, 2009, Nova College Tour).
It is probably fair to conclude that the internal orientation of the SDI community is moving
towards a more external one. The walls of the SDIs are coming down which paves
the way for building bridges. In this respect, the conference theme Spatial Data Infrastructure
Convergence: Building SDI Bridges to Address Global Challenges is very
timely. In this book several of these bridges are explored, described and examined,
although the focus in many articles is still on making SDI more ready to go external.
The articles presented in this book have gone through a full peer review process where
each article was reviewed by three members of the peer review board. It appears that
this volume covers three foci areas in the SDI research community: (1) Issues evolving
around service-oriented SDIs, including catalogues, funding, legal aspects, modelling
and metadata, (2) Critical assessment of SDIs, and (3) Community bridging.
TOWARDS SERVICE-ORIENTED SDIS
The focus of SDIs have moved from a data orientation in the 1990s to a process orientation
in the late 1990s-2005 towards service-oriented SDIs exemplified by the IN-
SPIRE directive in Europe and the Spatially enabling government initiative in Australia.
Several of the challenges that service-oriented SDIs are facing are discussed in this
volume.
A prime service needed to fully exploit the notion of SDI deals with the comprehensive
access to the underlying data. A nice service to do so is presented in The Potential of a
National Atlas as Integral Part of the Spatial Data infrastructure Exemplified by the New
Dutch National Atlas by Menno-Jan Kraak, Ferjan Ormeling, Barend Köbben and Trias
Aditya. National atlases contain comprehensive combinations of spatial datasets represented
by maps that each completely covers a country, with an added narrative function.
National atlases would benefit from an up-to-date data flow, and the SDI would
benefit from integrated visual summaries of available spatial data and geo-services in
well-designed comparable maps using the narrative characteristics of the atlas. As
such the national atlas provides alternative interactive and dynamic access to the SDI.
It may very well be that the Atlas interface and functionalities are the standard for the
next generation Geoportals.
Not only access to data is important, but also access to services that allow the data to
really contribute to the user’s needs. In Development and Deployment of a Services
Catalog in Compliance with the INSPIRE Metadata Implementing Rules, Javier Nogueras-Iso,
Jesús Barrera, Antonio Frederico Rodríguez, Rocío Recio, Christian Laborda
and Francisco Javier Zarazaga-Soria argue that services catalogues will constitute
a key element for SDI development. They are essential to facilitate the reusability
of services. Therefore, it is necessary to move towards more interoperable descriptions
of services. The authors present the development and deployment of a first prototype
of a services catalogue in the SDI of Spain. This new prototype allows for providing
online services such as metadata creation, dynamic indexing and metadata search, as
well as the connection with generic clients, which allow verifying the correct operation
of services.