How to INSPIRE Citizens: Towards Open Access to High-Volume Public Sector Geodata

摘要

Gradually, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) come to life. From trans-national down to municipal level geo-services for citizens are being established. In the European Union, the INSPIRE framework directive regulates public sector geo-data offering. Currently, INSPIRE Annexes II and III data specifications are in progress. The themes addressed there are distinguished by their heavy occurrence of high-volume multidimensional coverage data, foremost raster data, but also point clouds, TINs, etc. Both their sheer sizing, ranging into multi-Petabytes, and their new functional requirements impose new challenges which the INSPIRE Thematic Working Group teams try to address. Regularly, INSPIRE bases its directives on the interoperability standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) which undertakes standardization of geo-data and services. As for Annex II and III, the question of re-use or own development arises again, consultation between OGC and INSPIRE has started. Under inspection is the OGC coverage model and Web Coverage Service (WCS) standards suite. In our contribution we explain rationale of this discussion and present the OGC coverage model and WCS argueing their usefulness for open, flexible, and scalable SDIs as targeted by INSPIRE Annexes II and III.