GeoE3 has published the first data integration platform demonstrating how vital connections between existing and emerging national, regional, and cross-border digital services can be made. With the newly launched platform, GeoE3 shows how meaningful analysis and visualization in national and cross-border contexts can be simplified for ease of use.
Buildings in red are in Level of Detail 2 (LoD2) and buildings in blue are in Level of Detail 1 (LoD1). LoD1 is generated on the fly using either building height (Spain) or digital surface model (Finland, Norway).
The GeoE3 is a project co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union. GeoE3 is focusing on use cases that show how to dynamically integrate high-value data sets and services, like meteorological or statistical data, with geospatial features from existing national geospatial data platforms, like building data or road network data.
“Our platform now gives, for the first time, API access to 3D data in Europe. We can now show how data integration in Europe can successfully be made.”
Antti Jakobsson, Chief Engineer, Basic Spatial Data Services, National Land Survey of Finland, and leader of the GeoE3 Project.
Use cases
Environmental phenomena, such as acidification, forest degradation, floods, and other effects of climate change, do not respect national borders. Therefore, the GeoE3 Data Integration Platform shows how to establish international interoperable frameworks that enable cross-border geospatial data to be easily combined with other information sources. The content integration enables exploration and visualization of important climate, meteorological and environmental indicators.
Based on OGC Standards
The GeoE3 Data Integration Platform is hosted on a server providing the required backend services. The backend services are based on OGC APIs to ensure interoperability and to enable the creation of frontend dashboards and visualizations for an improved understanding of data from a variety of sources. The common OGC Standards like OGC API – Features or OGC API – Coverages are used for the architecture. Appropriate software is available and documented in the GeoE3 software repository. The goal of the platform site is to produce tangible results that can serve as best practices for other domains, disciplines, and areas, with GeoE3’s tools and services used to address compelling use-cases.
Using National Data
GeoE3 builds on national data. We connect to the national services based on investigation of the interoperability level, and taking into account the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) principles. Our solution also includes the possibility for automatic data quality assessment and provision of interoperability results through our data quality dashboard concept.
As we build on national data services, the data is always up-to-date. Current national data providers include: the National Land Survey of Finland; the Netherlands’ Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency; the Spanish Cadastral Agency; the National Centre for Geographic Information in Spain; the Estonian Land Board; the Norwegian Mapping Agency; The Finnish Meteorological Institute; Statistics Finland; and we are open to adding more. In Finland, we have also utilised open building data from the Digital and Population Data Services Agency as well as energy certificates data from the Housing Finance and development Centre of Finland – further demonstrating the capability to integrate more than just spatial data.
Looking to the Future
By enabling the Open Public Data Digital Service Infrastructure, GeoE3 develops fundamental services for the European citizen by enhanced availability, interoperability, and integration of services. What is currently a Data Integration Platform can in the future simplify the discovery of relevant data and improve services through the adoption of the latest standards, with an emphasis on Web APIs and linked-data principles.
The Data Integration Platform is an important step forward to provide European data services based on tested deliverables, applicable to a variety of cross-domain applications, and compliant with on-going or upcoming infrastructure developments like INSPIRE or GAiA-X. These support the growing number of stakeholders compelled to sustain European geospatial ecosystems. The GeoE3 ecosystem will leverage the value of Public Open Data and will expand by following its guiding principles to Discover, Improve, and Grow.
For more information
- GeoE3 Data Integration Platform https://geoe3platform.eu/geoe3/
- Examples: https://geoe3platform.eu/geoe3/examples/
- Web site: https://geoe3.eu
- Git Repository: https://github.com/opengeospatial/GEOE3