MOTIIVE
An INSPIRE Data Harmonisation
Pilot Project
Chris Higgins
EDINA, University of Edinburgh,
chris.higgins@ed.ac.uk
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 1 of 15
Project Partners:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
HR Wallingford (coordinators)
UK Hydrographic Office
Nansen Environment & Remote Sensing Centre
ARGOSS
Social Change Online
EDINA
Central Laboratory of the Research Councils
(CCLRC)
• Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission
(IOC-IODE)
• IDG Consultants
• EUCC – European Coastal Union
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 2 of 15
An INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in Europe
Pilot Project:
• INSPIRE directive approved by the European
parliament on the 12th Feb 07
• Member States will have to make available free
of charge the services for discovering and,
subject to certain specific conditions, viewing
spatial data sets
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 3 of 15
What is MOTIIVE?
• MOTIIVE is an INSPIRE pilot project covering data
harmonisation issues in the marine domain
• How to implement data services in the marine domain
based on ISO and OGC standards
• Supports IHO and IOC in establishing a registry
infrastructure for standards and services that new
information services can be built upon.
• Also engaging WMO (via Met. Office UK)
• Demonstrate and document the above process,
including the cost:benefit of using open standards
interoperability
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 4 of 15
Whyfor MOTIIVE?
and dozens of other projects
• Demand at multiple different levels (global, regional,
national, local) for reliable and timely spatial
information to underpin decision making
• Need for Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) which in
turn need open interoperability standards
• ISO/TC211, OGC, CEN
• Coastal zone particularly challenging
• Just finding the data, nevermind “Publish, find and
bind” has proven difficult in practice
• Emphasis on reuse and subscribing, not reinventing
“subscribe, don’t describe”
• In terms of data harmonisation, MOTIIVE is strong on
reuse of feature type definitions
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 5 of 15
For each XSD (for the
source data) there is an
XSLT to translate the
data to the Feature
Types (FT) defined by
CSML. The FT’s and
XSLT are maintained in a
‘MarineXML registry’
Data from different
parts of the marine
community conforming
to a variety of schema
(XSD)
XSD
XML
Biological
Species
Phenomena in the
XSD must have
an associated
portrayal
The FTs can then
be translated to
equivalent FTs for
display in the
ECDIS system
S52 Portrayal
Library
XSD
XML
Chl-a from
Satellite
XSLT
XML
Parser
XSD
Measured
Hydrodynamics
XML
XSLT
XSLT
XSLT
Marine
XML
GML
(NDG)
XML
Feature
Types
XSD
XML
Modelled
Hydrodynamics
XSD
XML
S-57v3 GML
The result of the
translation is an
encoding that
contains the
Feature described using marine data in
S-57v3.1Application weakly typed (i.e.
Schema can be imported
generic) Features
and are equivalent to the
same features in CSML’
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide adapted from Kieran Millard (AUKEGGS, 2005)
XSLT
SENC
SeeMyDENC
XSLT
ECDIS acts as an
example client for
the data.
Data Dictionary
Features in the source
XSD must be present in
the data dictionary.
Slide 6 of 15
Australian Oceans Portal
1. Oceans portal application
–
–
–
–
Search for marine data and metadata
Data portrayal services
Download data
Information on standards and the data providers
2. National marine catalogue
–
–
–
–
Registry of data/services available from providers
Mechanism for providers to connect
Use international standards
Enhanced using an agreed governance model
3. Interoperable Data/Service providers
– Coalition of agencies that agree to expose their data and
tools
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 7 of 15
ud Use Case Model
«Publish»
Schema
Application Manager
Data Product
Specification Manager
Domain Expert
«Publish»
Data Access
Query Templates
«Publish»
Presentation Rules
«Publish»
Context
(Quickmap)
«Publish»
Usage Note
«Publish»
Vocabularies
Data Contributor
«include»
Establish Server
«realize»
«include»
«Publish»
Service Profile
«Publish»
Service Metadata
Discover Data
(DIS)
Access data (ACC)
«extend»
Visualise Data
«Publish»
Finder
Data Product User
Standards Coordinator
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 8 of 15
• Geographic ‘features’
– “abstraction of real world
phenomena” [ISO 19101]
– Type or instance
– Encapsulate important
semantics in universe of
discourse
– “Something you can name”
• Application schema
– Defines semantic content and
logical structure
– GML Canonical encoding
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 9 of 15
Marine Community defining
Features?
The marine community is broad and
there is no ‘one size fitsDredging
all marine
& Extraction
feature’ (MarineXML Position
Paper 2005
).
Energy
As this is the community, Physical
the lack
of clear
Chemical
Navigation
Science
rules means there is significant
scopeWater
for
= Biological
variation in how
the
feature
is defined;
these
Quality
Meteorology
Fisheries
feature types may lack
coherence and
Aquaculture
consistency with each other.Conservation
So….
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 10 of 15
Separation of concerns
• “The key to interoperability is the formalisation of
shared knowledge in communities through the
definition and cataloguing of ‘feature types’.” (ISO
TC/211)
• Consistent Feature Types derived from a common
coceptual model can be defined in response to a
specific requirement “subscribe don’t describe”
• Can then map from one Feature Type to another
• Motiive is delivering an ebRIM registry implementation
of the OGC Catalogue2 specification which in turn will
deliver a Feature Type Catalogue
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 11 of 15
Feature Type Catalogues
• ISO19110. “Feature catalogues defining the types of
features, their operations, attributes, and associations
represented in geographic data are indispensable to
turning the data into usable information”.
• Housed in an ebRIM registry will allow rich levels of
association between catalogued resources to be
expressed and navigated, eg, feature type inheritance
hierarchies, operations defined on features
• Many other related geospatial resources in this soup;
vocabularies, application schemas, text documents,
etc.
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 12 of 15
A marine coastal scenario:
• Assumption: an era of harmonised SDI
– Can access a range of data and
processing services across the
internet
– All available using standardsbased interoperable web services
• Our user wants to evaluate the
predicted output from a variety of tidal
models against historical data to test
quality of the models
• And she wants to see the results
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 13 of 15
Use Cases:
• Query feature type catalogue
• Discover data access service
– based on feature type, keyword and extent
• Discover service by interface
– query feature type catalogue to find service that
affects a feature transformation
– Requires ability to navigate inheritance hierarchy
• Discover service by type
– returns a portrayal service
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 14 of 15
Conclusion
• MOTIIVE is examining the use of standards to achieve
semantic interoperability
• Is building on MarineXML and the Australian Oceans
Portal
• Extending to integrate Feature Type Catalogues with
Service Catalogues
• “work in progress”
• The ISO TC/211/OGC suite of standards is a powerful
(but still relatively untested?) interoperability framework
• Many new research questions will arise as experience
with this framework is accumulated
Email: chris.higgins@ed.ac.uk
European Geoinformatics, Edinburgh, 7-9 March 2007
Slide 15 of 15