From a classical web mapping publication to
a Inspire Service architecture
in the Cloud
BRGM, Pierre LAGARDE
CNR, Claudio LUCCHESE
Currently, the majority of the environmental information dissemination on the web is done with
the creation and the deployment of a specific map service (webmapping) in the IT organization
of the data provider. In the context of the European IST InGeoClouds project
(www.ingeoclouds.eu), we aim to change this paradigm and to develop a INSPIRE service-based
approach for data publication in a scalable architecture without changing the users experience
and data-publishers usual behaviours.
The InGeoClouds (CIP - ICT - PSP 2011 4.1 - Towards a cloud of public services) project aims at
demonstrating the feasibility of employing a cloud-based infrastructure coupled with the
necessary services to provide seamless access to geospatial public sector information, especially
targeting the geological, geophysical and other geoscientific information. This kind of
information exhibits interesting characteristics like the size of the available data, the existing
metadata descriptions (mostly according to the European Directive INSPIRE) and the current
availability of related services that can be moved to the cloud.
The poject targets 3 objectives: a) a technical architecture dedicated to geo-data publication in
the public cloud but agnostic of the cloud provider, b) a definition and deployment of a scalable
and “on-demand” application allowing to publish geo-information dedicated to the public
sector, c) a functional approach to transform a map as a set of services in compliance with the
requirements of INSPIRE regulations: metadata, view and download service.
The technical architecture is based on a set of scalable and independent components: elastic
and scalable file system (GlusterFS), replicated database in PostGres and high performance data
publication WMS/WFS server (MapServer). The project defines and implements a specific REST
API to manage each component, in particular to organize the elasticity of the architecture
(autoscaling) and to simplify the account/users management by data-provider’s applications.
The high-level API exposes REST services to interact easily with the geospatial components and
manage the publication of OGC services.
This architecture is deployed in the public Amazon Web Service cloud. The project analyses the
cost of this architecture in comparison with a classical “in-premises” IT architecture and the
benefits and weakness of an “on-demand” architecture for a SDI infrastructure. Preliminary
results confirm that “moving to the cloud” can bring some interesting cost reduction. In
addition, the deployed architecture can exploit the elasticity and scalability features of a cloud
environment.
The second achievement is the deployment of facilities supporting the process of data import
and data publication (Geo-publication use case in the InGeoClouds project). The rationale is to
provide a “data-provider” workspace, to guarantee the “isolation” of each data pushed by a
data-provider in his workspace within the cloud infrastructure, to manage the security of the
system and to mask all technical challenges to respect the performance and availability of the
OGC services required by the INSPIRE directive. The project will analyse the elasticity of the
architecture to expose WMS and WFS services with stress testbeds of the application.
Instead of proposing a simple interface to transform geo-dataset as OGC services and to add this
service to a common geo-portal (webmapping), the application defines a map-oriented design
for a data-provider. Based on the content of the OGC Web Map Context standards (a ordered
list of layers) with extensions to manage map options, like Man Machine Interactions,
functionalities options, design interfaces, etc., the data-publisher focuses on the creation of an
specific map with his data. But, in a same time, the application allows to “transform” the (web-)
map as a set of INSPIRE services for visualize and download datasets. Data-providers, like local
authorities, national organisations, surveys, associations, etc., are requested to use a
software/service (Software as a Service) to publish their data on the web and to respect the
INSPIRE requirements. The system we are presenting here goes in the direction of supporting
this process.
In conclusion, the InGeoClouds project proposes an alternative solution to create INSPIRE
services without changing the principles of the directive, in particular data-provider
responsibilities for publishing, sharing and re-using geospatial datasets as services in a
distributed architecture (SDI). The definition of a geospatial extensible architecture, the use of
the elasticity of the cloud infrastructure and the deployment of a data-provider software for
publishing maps on the Web define an easily solution for public sector to be compliance with
the INSPIRE regulations without investment in a specific in-house infrastructure.