Spatial data infrastructure components to provide regional climate information services

Abstract

The assessment of expected climate changes on a regional scale requires appropriate data and information products that must be easily accessible and usable for decision makers. The regional climate information platform ReKIS is a long-established project of three German federal states to address this purpose. However, with increasing content, this web-based data exchange platform lacked in suitable metadata descriptions, search functionalities and interoperability, thus hampering the discovery and access of suitable information. This paper describes the extending and enhancing of ReKIS using state-of-the-art components of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). The components support metadata acquisition, maintenance and publishing using a metadata catalogue. The implementation of a WebGIS server increases interoperability by offering OGC-compliant services and a web framework for knowledge-transfer allows for non-expert access to climate services. The approaches were developed and implemented in a real-world scenario and are suitable for a transfer to other comparable platforms and use cases.