NEW WAYS OF EXPLORING CARTOGRAPHY. DEVELOPMENT OF SPANISH NSDI

S. Mas-Mayoral, A.F. Rodriguez, P. Abad-Power, A. Sanchez-Maganto, J.A. Alonso-Jimenez

National Geographic Institute, Spain

smas@fomento.es

The Spanish Spatial Data Infrastructure (Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales de España, IDEE), is accessible through the Internet (www.idee.es) since July 2004, is an example of a collective project based on the cooperation of a large number of actors in Spain: governmental bodies at national, regional and local levels, private companies, universities, citizens,…designed to offer a wide range of geographic resources freely on the net All these goals are achieved through consensus and experiences interchange according to INSPIRE guidelines, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) interoperability specifications and ISO 19100 standards.

This project has been coordinated by the National Geographic Council, a governmental body, which committed its Geomatic Commission to define the IDEE (Spanish SDI). This Commission launched a Working Group for the IDEE that has produced technical recommendations: Spanish Core Metadata based on ISO 19115 and Dublin Core and Spanish Gazetteer Model based on Project Alexandria Digital Library and ISO 19112, to harmonize the individual initiatives of its members.

The IDEE is a distributed, multilingual, internet accessible system in which cooperate sinergically existing SDIs in Spain. It offers a wide range of services compliant OGC standards: Catalogue Service Web (CSW), Web Map Service (WMS), Gazetteer Service (Gaz), Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Coverage Service (WCS) and Web Map Context (WMC).

Recently, some quite interesting applications has been developed using those services: a freeware standard OGC client of WMS and Gaz services for PDAs; a three-dimensional navigation programme, also freely available, that can use any available image provided by a WMS in combination with a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) served by a standard WCS; spatial analysis applications to explore Corine Land Cover data and DTM information of a region; and some examples of Web Processing Services offering geoprocessing functionalities with standardised interface, ready to be integrated in other applications and geoservices.