Core Location Pilot - Interconnecting Belgian Address Data

This draft report describes the results of the Core Location Pilot ‘Interconnecting Belgian National and Regional Address Data’, which was carried out in the context of Action 1.1 of the Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA) Programme of the European Commission in the period November 2012 – February 2013.

The pilot's user interface can be accessed via this link: http://location.testproject.eu/BEL/ .

Presentation delivered at the INSPIRE 2013 conference in Florence.

2013 06-25 goedertier-inspire-2013 from Goedertier Stijn

Pilot participants: AGIV, CIRB, bpost, FEDICT, SPW, NGI /IGN, EC INSPIRE team, ISA Programme

European public administrations maintain base registers with authentic address data. Example of such base registers are the British National Street Gazetteer, the Dutch  BAG, or the Flemish CRAB register. According to the European Interoperability Framework [EIF], base registers are the cornerstone of public service. Therefore, the EIF recommends public administrations to develop interfaces to authentic sources and align them at semantic and technical level.

To date, the public sector has not yet tapped into the full potential of its base address registers. In Belgium, for example, the use of address data is impeded by the following obstacles:

1. Address data fragmentation. The address data at Belgian federal level and at the three regions is housed in isolated registries maintained by the National civil register, AGIV, CIRB, and SPW.
2. Heterogeneous address data formats. Address data is provided using different specifications.
3. Lack of common identifiers. Addresses, administrative units, roads, buildings, and cadastral parcels are not identified by well-formed identifiers thus making it hard to reconcile data about the same entity coming from different sources.

This situation is depicted in the Figure below. Due to these obstacles, consumers of address data such as national, regional, and local public administrations, businesses, and citizens make limited use of the aforementioned registers.

The pilot demonstrates that:

• The Core Location RDF Vocabulary can be used as a foundational RDF Vocabulary to harmonise address data that originates from disparate organisations and systems;
• The Core Location RDF vocabulary can be flexibly extended with experimental INSPIRE RDF vocabularies (i.e. transport networks and administrative units);
• HTTP URI sets can be derived from INSPIRE thematic and external object identifiers for address data, allowing to create harmonised Web identifiers for respectively spatial things and spatial objects such as addresses ;
• A linked data infrastructure can provide access to harmonised, linked, and enriched location data using standard Web-based interfaces (such as HTTP and SPARQL) and Web-based languages (such as XHTML, RDF+XML), on top of either:
  • ​existing relational/spatial database systems, by applying conversion from a relational database to RDF;
  • existing INSPIRE XML data, by applying XSLTs to automatically generate RDF, starting from XML-encoded INSPIRE-compliant meta/data;
• ​The use of standard Web interfaces (such as HTTP(S) and SPARQL) can simplify the use of address data for humans and machines.

Find more practical information and examples about Linked Data

• INSPIRE data specifications
• Core Location Vocabulary
• Designing URI sets for location
• Should base registers provide URIs for Addresses?
• Case study on how Linked Data is transforming eGovernment
• 10 Rules for persistent URIs
• How to describe organizations in RDF using the Registered Organization vocabulary
• SEMIC webpage on Joinup

Nature of documentation: Technical report