The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission has launched two pilot projects with private sector partners from Spain and The Netherlands to demonstrate the benefits of using Linked and Open INSPIRE Data using RDF, a developer friendly W3C specification for building the Semantic Web.
The JRC, in its efforts to facilitate cross-sector interoperability and help reuse the investments of INSPIRE in other data infrastructures, including Linked Data and Open Data portals, has procured and launched the development of two pilots. These pilots aim to illustrate how INSPIRE data can help in different e-Government services as well as the feasibility and possible benefits of representing INSPIRE data in RDF.
The first pilot is developed by Guadaltel(link is external), a Spanish company based in Seville with sound experience in the semantic web, geospatial data and RDF implementations. The pilot addresses use cases in the area of the environment, more specifically related to the provisioning of a hydrography RDF services based on national INSPIRE data published by CNIG(link is external) (Centro Nacional de Información Geográfica). This RDF data can serve many applications but will explore its possible use within regional government and water management.
The second pilot was awarded to the Dutch company Netage(link is external), who specialises in applications for emergency response teams. Their INSPIRE RDF pilot sets out to improve the information position of emergency responders by using Linked INSPIRE Data as a central point of reference. In this context, the Dutch Kadaster and the Dutch Safety Regions will support Netage with the provision of their available data. By developing this pilot, Netage wants to show how geospatial links can be augmented with administrative links to provide more context and allow for better decision-making, as well as to demonstrate how these administrative relations can benefit wider use cases related to activities in the public domain.
Both companies are working in close collaboration with national data providers, where these strategic partners have the opportunity to leverage on these pilots to enhance their dataset availability and explore the benefits of Linked Data in practice.
The development of these two pilots will also serve to provide input to the Guidelines for Transforming INSPIRE data into RDF(link is external) which JRC is developing in parallel. These guidelines provide a draft methodology and vocabularies for further testing through the pilots and act as a signpost for everyone that wants to use RDF to represent or consume INSPIRE data. A draft version of the guidelines are currently open for public consultation and experts are welcome to provide inputs.
Together, these activities will provide a framework that can be reused to create added-value services on top of INSPIRE data using the potential of RDF and Linked Data and furthering the interoperability that INSPIRE has put in place, leading to the possible creation of a new INSPIRE Technical Guidance to be developed through further discussion with the EU Member States.
A first presentation on the pilots, “Linked INSPIRE data - feasibility and benefits”, will be presented on the 22nd of March during the Location Powers: Big Linked Geodata(link is external) workshop in Delft, the Netherlands.
If you would like to know more about the RDF pilot activities or the Guidelines for Transforming INSPIRE data into RDF, please feel free to contact us on are3na@jrc.ec.europa.eu(link sends e-mail) and visit our GitHub repository