Abstract

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) established during the past two decades “unlocked” heterogeneous geospatial datasets. The European Union INSPIRE Directive laid down the foundation of a pan-European SDI where thousands of public sector data providers make their data, including sensor observations, available for cross-border and cross-domain reuse. At the same time, SDIs should inevitably adopt new technology and standards to remain fit for purpose and address in the best possible way the needs of different stakeholders (government, businesses and citizens). Some of the recurring technical requirements raised by SDI stakeholders include: (i) the need for adoption of RESTful architectures; together with (ii) alternative (to GML) data encodings, such as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and binary exchange formats; and (iii) adoption of asynchronous publish–subscribe-based messaging protocols. The newly established OGC standard SensorThings API is particularly interesting to investigate for INSPIRE, as it addresses together all three topics. In this manuscript, we provide our synthesised perspective on the necessary steps for the OGC SensorThings API standard to be considered as a solution that meets the legal obligations stemming out of the INSPIRE Directive. We share our perspective on what should be done concerning: (i) data encoding; and (ii) the use of SensorThings API as a download service.

Highlights

  • Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) built during the past two decades brought numerous novelties and triggered a process that considerably improved the availability and accessibility of spatial data.A similar approach might be adopted in fields where the sharing and reuse of data are needed

  • We provide our synthesised perspective on the necessary steps for the OGC SensorThings application programming interface (API) standard to be considered as a solution that meets the legal obligations stemming from the INSPIRE Directive, simplifying the process for extending existing spatial data infrastructures to the Internet of Things (IoT)

  • The paper is divided into four sections. Following this brief Introduction (Section 1), in Section 2, we describe the background with an emphasis on the legislative and technological context in Europe, as well as the SensorThings API standard along with the existing implementations and an overview of use cases

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Summary

Introduction

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) built during the past two decades brought numerous novelties and triggered a process that considerably improved the availability and accessibility of spatial data. The adoption of the Directive brought multiple novelties to public sector authorities, including: (i) the requirement to expose data and metadata in a service oriented architecture; (ii) strong reliance on international standards; and (iii) a collaborative consensus-based approach during the specification drafting Those developments, combined, provide access to thousands of spatial datasets. From our perspective the benefits of the proposed approach are manifold as the technological lessons learned from the establishment of SDIs can be reused in other contexts that face similar challenges Those relate to: (i) multiple actors involved on different levels; (ii) heterogeneous data management practices; (iii) semantic issues; and (iv) differences in the discoverability and reusability of data. We consider our results applicable beyond Europe as well

INSPIRE in a Nutshell
Observation Data
Download Services
The OGC SensorThings API
The Data Model
RESTful Interface
Implementations
Alignment of Data Specifications
Process
Download Service Operations
Pre-Defined Dataset
Get Spatial Dataset
Link Download
Direct Access
Describe Spatial
Findings
Discussion and Conclusions
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