20.8.20041

Tim Richards& WP3 Partners

NEFIS Project Meeting WP3 Summary

28 – 30 June 2005, Ispra

20.8.20042

Work Package 3 Activities & Deliverables

NEFIS Technology Reviews

• Standards in the GI Sector

• Web Services & NEFIS – parts I & II NEFIS ”Big Picture” Architectural Design – UML

• Design Report (D9) NEFIS Knowledgebase on Forest Information Systems

• KB Demonstrator (D2) EFIS-RD

• Updated EFIS Resource Discovery System

(D2b)

20.8.20043

Technology Review 1 - Standards in the GI Sector

• Open GIS Consortium • Abstract specifications• Implementation specifications• Geospatial Metadata:

• ISO 19100 Series• Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (FGDC)• The OpenGIS Abstract Specification; Topic11: Metadata

(OGC)• Geospatial Data & Services

• Global Spatial Data Infrastructure - GSDI• Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe - INSPIRE• European Position

20.8.20044

Technology Review 2 - Web Services & NEFIS

• Web Enabling Technologies

• Metadata

• XML – as an enabling syntax

• Web Services:

• UDDI – resource discovery

• WSDL – resource / service description

• SOAP – data object packaging

• Semantic Web – Ontological Languages

20.8.20045

Technology Review 2 - Web Services & NEFIS Conclusions – re cataloguing

• Continue using DC

• Use XML

• Use WS – not inconsistent with DC

• Remain flexible Conclusions – re ddb functionality – 3 options

• CORBA

• Federated Web Services (XML, SOAP, WSDL)

• Semantic Web

20.8.20046

NEFIS Knowledgebase (KB) The purpose of the KB is to provide an on-line

repository for information on forest information systems, including:

• outputs from NEFIS activities• freely available documentation on forest information

systems/services development initiatives (e.g. Global Forest

Information Service – GFIS; European Forest Information Service –

EFIS, National Forest Information System – NFIS) and other

relevant projects• relevant software resources, tools, reports and documents

A metadata catalogue of information resources – defined by its

collection policy – i.e. Forest information systems & related

knowledge

http://nkb.efi.fi

20.8.20047

NEFIS Knowledgebase

http://nkb.efi.fi

20.8.20048

Q. What is the NEFIS Metadata Standard?

http://nkb.efi.fi

20.8.20049

Architectural Design – UML (Cf. Presentation on Wednesday)

20.8.200410

EFIS Information Resource Discovery System

EFIS-RD Activities : Updated to use mySQL database Updated to use the NEFIS metadata elements, including the

EEA spatial reference system profile Updated to use the NEFIS keywords for data entry and

browsing Updated to demonstrate a simple distributed forest area by

administrative unit information service, including linkage to the VTK

20.8.200411

EFIS Resource Discovery System

System enables:

Metadata entry Metadata searching Metadata editing Browsing by keyword Distributed data

extraction demo

20.8.200412

EFIS Information Resource Discovery System

Distributed Search Implemented using XML-RPC Enables:

• query of distributed information services – by country• extraction of sub-national forest area data• packaging of data into XML• communication of XML data across HTTP connection• collation of data into one aggregate result set• visualisation of collated data in the VTK

Constitutes a simple “web service”. [NB, a fully featured

web-service would more likely use UDDI, WSDL and SOAP]

20.8.200413

EFIS-RD Data Collection / Collation Demo – sub-national forest area statistics

Java XML-RPC servers provide national information services, data is packaged into XML for transport over HTTP, a multi-threaded XML-RPC client in the EFIS-RD system receives data from each server, collates it, presents it in a table and lastly prepares it for use in the VTK.

Servers Client* 1

Standardised Data ...or Standardisation Toolkit

20.8.200414

WP3 Summary Standards & Technology

• Web Services (UDDI, WSDL, SOAP, etc)• GI standards

Project Activities• NEFIS Knowledgebase • Proposal for a Forest Markup Language• Architectural Design / UML• EFIS-Resource Discovery - Metadata • EFIS-RD distributed data extraction and collation (XML-

RPC)

Adds up to a coherent work package