Dissemination of harmonized and aggregated thematic data collected from several national and regional resources, and their presentation in a common and well understood way is the principal objective of the GIS4EU project. To achieve this goal, a GIS4EU Geoportal is being developed as a part of Work package 8 activities.
The GIS4EU Geoportal is implemented using the Intergraph Geomedia family of products, including the most recent “SDI Pro ready” enhanced mechanisms for building efficient GI infrastructures. It is a web client ‘’allinplace” multilingual application supporting discovering, binding and displaying of geographic data published in standardized form for web services from several heterogeneous GIS resources functioning at different locations in Europe.
In the GIS4EU project, the Geoportal will not only serve for presentation of final project outcomes, but will also document the steps of harmonization and aggregation processes required by the INSPIRE Directive. The early geoportal version already provides discovery and viewing of original and remodelled data sources provided to GIS4EU by project partners. Both original and remodelled data are published for internal use using WMS standard services and initially aggregated using online chaining WMS services. The remodelled data provided for administrative units, hydrography and transport network themes follow INSPIRE draft data specifications for corresponding themes.
Searching is based on INSPIRE compliant metadata describing original resources, services, and the series of remodelled datasets. The searching mechanism is integrated with map viewer, so the spatial extent of resources described by discovered metadata can be displayed directly on the map, and the selected resource of interest can be added to the map legend with single click. The content can be displayed in several scales with user defined scale ranges. To facilitate searching of European cities, a gazetteer for city names is also published and utilized in Geoportal.
Once all of the SDI building blocks are established for GIS4EU aggregated data and tested for their compliance with project requirements, the Geoportal will be published to a broad audience. For now, Geoportal is used internally by GIS4EU partners to monitor progress, evaluate intermediate results of remodelling and aggregation, and achieve tangible operational validation of certain project decisions. The estimated time for public release is February 2010.