Implementing INSPIRE SDS metadata in GeoNetwork

INSPIRE SDS

The European INSPIRE directive sets standards and requirements for estabilishing a common infrastructure for spatial information in Europe. To ensure that the spatial data infrastructures of the Member States are compatible and usable in a Community and transboundary context, the Directive requires that common Implementing Rules (IR) are adopted in a number of specific areas (Metadata, Data Specifications, Network Services, Data and Service Sharing and Monitoring and Reporting).

Spatial data services are services that do not provide the “standard” functionalities for viewing, downloading or transforming spatial data as are offered by network services. They provide added value to users and are therefore usually tailored to a specific application domain. While they are therefore quite diverse, it will be crucial to make them available in the INSPIRE infrastructure – at least by describing them with standardised metadata – in order to allow end users and software developers to integrate the INSPIRE data in their web, mobile and desktop applications.

GeoNetwork

GeoNetwork is a catalog application to manage spatially referenced resources. It provides powerful metadata editing and search function. GeoNetwork has been developed to connect spatial information communities and their data using a modern architecture, which is at the same time powerful and low cost, based on the principles of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and International and Open Standards for services and protocols (a.o. from ISO/TC211 and OGC).

Since its inception, GeoNetwork has supported the most common metadata standards, using ISO19115:2003/ISO19139 as the preferred standard for geographic metadata. The INSPIRE directive defines its own metadata standard as an application profile of ISO19139, that is a slight customization to the original standard. This customization sets requirements according to what the metadata record is documenting. According to the object that is going to be documented (a dataset, a data aggregation, or a service), the INSPIRE profile sets specific constraints about what info are needed and how such info should be encoded in the metadata.

GeoNetwork already covers a great amount of the INSPIRE requirements, but it was lacking the support for Spatial Data Services, a profile whose implementation became mandatory on December 2015 for EU national Organizations. In order to be compliant with the INSPIRE directive, Bundesamt für Eich- und Vermessungswesen (BEV) commissioned to GeoSolutions the implementation of the support for SDS metadata into GeoNetwork 3.

The SDS metadata implementation in GeoNetwork follows closely what is already there for INSPIRE. The administrator shall have to enable the INSPIRE view as usual in GeoNetwork 3. The INSPIRE view did have a single tab; a new tab called “SDS” have been added: it only contains the fields that are described in the INSPIRE SDS specification. The INSPIRE documentation differentiate SDS’s according to three different conformance classes. The more compliant the service is to the INSPIRE requirements, the more metadata are needed to be defined. The SDS metadata editor will help the user understand which are the requirements for each conformance class, by splitting the required fields in different sections, which clearly shows the class.

SDS Editor: Conformance Class 1

SDS Editor: Conformance Class 2

Since the work is quite extensive, it has not been directly committed into the main repository, but a review has been requested to the GeoNetwork community before doing that step; a Pull Request that adds the SDS implementation into the official GeoNetwork‘s GitHub repository is now (at the time of writing) open.

If you want to do some early testing, this is the temporary link where you can find a pre-built package of GeoNetwork with the SDS code available. Notice that this file will be removed once the new code gets into the official build

If you want to know more about how we can help your organization, don’t hesitate and get in touch with us! Make sure to check our Enterprise Services Offer which has been used to complete the work described in this post.

The GeoSolutions Team,