European Location Framework - Making WebGIS a reality based on Authoritative Sources
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Jakobsson, A.
1NATIONAL LAND SURVEY OF FINLAND Email: antti.jakobsson@nls.fi
Abstract
The European Location Framework (ELF) project (www.elfproject.eu) is working to create the first im-plementation of a geospatial reference infrastructure based on national information assets. Further description of the European Location Framework is available in the ELF White Paper. The Project is working currently with 14 countries to start provision of INSPIRE based services for utilization at Euro-pean, cross-border and national use. Even the project is funded for a fixed three-year term (2013-2016), it assures the sustainability of the ELF infrastructure under support of the community of European key stakeholders beyond the end of the project term.Project is seeking to enlarge the participation to cover EU member states and also other reference data providers not limited to European national mapping and cadastral authorities (NMCAs). Important new services from the ELF are joined-up web maps providing reference maps utilizing ad-ministrative units, cadastral parcels, hydrography, transport network and buildings. A new Basemap for Europe providing reference maps at different levels of details and a georeferencing service (Ge-oLocator) using geographical names, addresses and administrative units will be provided. In addition to the web maps ELF will provide access to data through Web Feature Services. This enables application providers to create analysis of the ELF data. All these data will be provided through ELF platform and affiliated platforms. ELF platform will be operated by the NMCAs and affiliated platforms by Cloud GIS platform providers like ESRI (ArcGIS Online). ELF Platform is based on open source SDI platform Oskari. The framework will include: • Legal and administrative infrastructure • Technical infrastructure; i.e. services for delivering data • Data for the services Through geo-tools implementing the ELF specifications, the ELF platform will provide access to refer-ence geo-information and services based on NMCAs and other public sector geo-information. Value-added services can be developed utilizing ELF cloud services. The approach ELF has taken, based upon the successful results of the ESDIN project, is that NMCAs would map their current specifications against ELF specifications using matching tables. Transforma-tion tools are at the heart of the ELF implementation. The transformation tools will harmonise/transform existing geographical datasets from the participating NMCAs to the ELF data specifications developed. The next step is to do the edge-matching using the International Boundaries and agreed points for crossing features like roads and rivers. A tool is provided by the project to make the edge-matching. All data provided to ELF will be automatically validated for quality. Quality metadata is required as a starting point from the national production and then using the ELF quality rules data will be validated. As ELF is targeting to provide the most up-to-date information and also different level of details, tools for change management and generalization will be provided by the project. NMCAs need to set up services for each data theme they provide. The basic principle is to use IN-SPIRE guidelines for service implementation. For each theme a WFS and WMS service should be made available. These national services will then be used to populate the ELF data caches and used for the cascading services (WMTS). ELF Basemap and GeoLocator services will be using these theme based WFSs and WMSs. The ELF platform will be implementing necessary authentication and access controls. The ELF should be the preferred solution for authoritative reference geo-information; to achieve this it is necessary to provide a platform which meets the user’s criteria for quality, security, updating, ease of access and simplicity. As a part of the ELF project, the necessary agreements and licenses will be developed. This will be closely related to the future governance structure of ELF, which is also being developed.
Keywords
Web Mapping; SDI; Interoperability