The Italian Geological Geoportal: an example of INSPIRE thematic
framework
C. Cipolloni, V. Campo, M.P. Congi, D. Delogu, M. Roma, R. Ventura, C. Zonetti
Geological Survey of Italy - ISPRA, Roma, Italy
The Geological Survey of Italy (ISPRA) has improved the Geoportal that carries out as
access point to Italian Geoscience community; to do the new version of Geoportal the
main aim has been the integration within the International Standard e.g. INSPIRE,
OGC,GeoSciML specific for the Geological community.
The Geoportal architecture is composed by a metadata catalogue where is stored in
several metadata profiles specific for dataset and services, in particular have been
implemented the INSPIRE standard profile and the italian standard profile named
RNDT (Law 32) edited by DigitPA (before CNIPA) to respond at national level to the
INSPIRE directive.
The metadata catalogue was build compliant to a OCG catalogue service in CSW 2.0.2
AP ISO (OGC, 2007). All the metadata files produced by the Geological Survey of Italy
were compiled in Italian language and a lot of these are also in English.
To simplify the research in the Geoportal, in the metadata title is present also the
metadata profile acronym standard and two letter that identified the language, for
example: “geologia_1M_INSPIRE_IT”.
The Geoportal has been designed to have an accessible facilities provided to the web
services and a wider choice of services available in a specific portal section, mainly in
OGC standard, like WMS (more than 40?), WFS, WCS and KML, but also in a
common commercial standard i.e. ArcGIS Server and ArcIMS. At the moment more
than 50 different services are published.
The use of multiple web map services is due to maintain at the national level high
standard in the symbolization of the map using the symbol libraries based on the
cartographic guidelines of the Geological Survey of Italy.
In the Geological geoportal we take in high consideration also the harmonization at the
European level, in fact there are specific section dedicated to two international projects
that highlight the role of a unique standard data model for geological information.
In particular the Geological Survey is partner of Interoperability working group of the
IUGS-CGI that has developed the geological data model (GeoSciML – Geoscience
Mark-up Language) and the encoding language for the geological information. This
model is based on an extension of the GML language and, at the moment, exist three
major release: version 2.1.1, that it’s the data model candidate for INSPIRE data
specification Annex II.4 (Theme Geology, JRC 2008), and two different release version
3.0 based on the two version of GML language (3.1.1 and 3.2.1- OGC, 2003; 2007b).
The other important international project, originated with the aim that try to harmonize
data content and data structure, using also GeoSciML version 2.1.1, is the OneGeology-
Europe project (more information is available at URL: http://www.onegeology-
europe.eu) where using 17 different vocabularies of geological terms and a unique client
build to able to respond at the GeoSciML language request, apply at European level,
was possible an harmonization of many geological maps on a scale of 1:1.000.000.
Both these project are part of the geoportal and in the WFS section there are examples
such as the service in GeoSciML language and also the potentiality offered by these. In
particular we using two different frontend framework to convert the request and the
response of the server, using GeoSciML language schema. The first type of application
has been build in Cocoon (Apache foundation software) and uses a series of xlst files to
match the local database schema at the standard data model. The other application
arrives from the OneGeology-Europe project and is developed in Java, specifically to
match in a flexible way the local terms and database at the GeoSciML data contents.
In the next year we will try to apply the OneGeology-Europe methodology to harmonize
in detail the regional geological data, using a centralize java connector to compose a
web map service puzzle.
Another important goal for the future is the application, when JRC will publish the data
model for Data Specification Annex III, to build specific framework to match our
landslide and natural resources data at the standard data model.
JRC 2008 – Drafting Team "Data Specifications" – deliverable D2.6: Methodology for
the development of data specifications, D2.6_v3.0-doc.
http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/reports/ImplementingRules/DataSpecifications/D2.6_v3.0.pdf
OGC 2003 – OpenGIS® Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard
version 3.1.1., doc- 03-105r1, http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=4700.
OGC 2007 - OpenGIS® Catalogue Services Specification version 2.0.2, doc-OGC 07-
006r1, http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=20555.
OGC 2007b - OpenGIS® Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard
version 3.2.1., doc-OGC 07-036, http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=20509.