The resources of the Spatial Data Infrastructure of Spain

The Spatial Data Infrastructure of Spain (in Spanish ‘IDEE’) is an ambitious project to harmonize and merge the geographical data handled by all Spanish public administrations, as well as the current geographic information services. The final goal of the project is to make all these valuable data accessible through the Internet and with an integrated format that increases its usefulness.

Like any effort to integrate data, metadata or information services, the IDEE implicitly entails an important effort to complete and standardize data, and to make it accessible by complying not only with interoperability standards and technical protocols, but also with the corresponding legal frameworks. But, as often happens in this kind of situations, other initiatives can subsequently benefit from a series of positive externalities in the form of technological advances for the participants or improvements of the coordination processes.

The body in charge of coordinating the IDEE is the Ministry of Infrastructure through the High Geographic Council, which is a collegiate body in which all the producers of digital geographic data are represented. It is intended to be integrated in the three levels of government existing in Spain. The IDEE also collaborates with research teams from universities and public and private companies that work with geographic information technologies.

The Geographical High Council also acts as a point of contact with the European Commission for the implementation of the Inspire Directive (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) in Spain, which provides legal framework at European level. Inspire establishes the general rules for the establishment of a Spatial Information Infrastructure in the EU, with a clear environmental vocation and based on the compatible and interoperable infrastructures of the Member States. It also propose, since 2007, a model to encourage the opening and reuse of geographic data that has been used as an example for the promotion of open data policies in the public sector at European level, including the Directive on the reuse of information in the public sector.

Some of the benefits that have already been materialized as a result of the IDEE are the large geographic information production projects that we have described among the digital treasures of the National Geographic Institute, such as the National Aerial Orthophoto Plan (PNOA) or the Information System on Land Use of Spain (SIOSE).

In the IDEE geoportal, all data sets, metadata and geographic information services that are integrated into the project are published. The geoportal includes services such as a data catalog that allows locating and accessing different sets of data and metadata or a map viewer that allows even panoramic flights. Of course, the data sets are available not only for making an inquiry, but it is also possible, in most cases, to download them as open data for later reuse by interested users.

In the geoportal resources section of the IDEE there are also two sections that provide special added value beyond the datasets themselves:

• A collection of free tools of different nature useful for working with geographic data. Among the free tools we can find, for example, different map viewers that can be integrated into third-party web applications. These are data visualization apps based on maps that have been developed by different regional governments and have been made available to the public through an application programming interface (API) as part of their spatial data infrastructures (IDE). The section also highlights services such as the download of geographic objects asynchronously based on the Web Processing Service (WPS) standard, services for the transformation of coordinates or 3D viewers.

• The developer's corner, where we can find a set of reference documents for application developers that use geographic data sets. These documents have been created based on the Technical Guidelines for Network Services of the Inspire Directive and the specifications of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). We can find for example a Guide to integrate WMS and WFS services in various applications or a technical guide related to the Visualization Service (WMS) or the Download Service (WFS 2.0.0). These documents are very useful for the development of visualization, download and localization services with different tools.

According to the Reusing Open Data report, elaborated by the European Data Portal, geographic data is the second data category most reused and consulted by companies in the member states of the European Union. Both in terms of data sets availability and harmonization, geographic data have a maturity degree that we still do not find in other sectors. In addition, we can say that, in terms of geographic information, Spain has not been limited to follow the trail of European legislation, whose deployment will not be completed until 2021, but has represented an example in its commitment and has gone beyond the minimum obligations imposed by Inspire.

Content prepared by Jose Luis Marín, Head of Corporate Technology Startegy en MADISON MK and Euroalert CEO.

Contents and points of view expressed in this publication are the exclusive responsibility of its author.