EGAL:a methodology for Environmental Geoportals Assessment and Label

Abstract

Geoportals are the gateway to access relevant geospatial data, which is of particular importance in environmental sciences. The ease of finding geoportals for specific themes or regions is especially needed from a community of practice perspective; in any case, the ease of discovering and providing access to relevant useable data is key in an efficient geospatial data search. Efficient data discovery and access is facilitated by data interoperability supported by specific standards, often put in place in a formal Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) framework. It is then important to have a methodology to easily determine if a geoportal is compliant with established efficiency characteristics for geospatial data discovery, access, and use. This paper provides the “Environmental Geoportals Assessment and Label” (EGAL) methodology to easily assess geoportals discovery and their ability to propose the discovery and access of useable data. Several geoportals are selected, categorized in a typology based on certain characteristics, and assessed through this methodology. Then a visual “EGAL” label is proposed, efficiently conveying the elements of success determined for a geoportal. We believe that such an efficient visual representation contributes to a useful spatial data infrastructure capacity building and can help community geoportals developers or stakeholders to improve these gateways to geospatial data.