Project Background
The JISC has been actively investing in the development of innovative geospatial data services and related tools and infrastructure to support its use for the past five years. (A working definition of geospatial data in this context is as follows; "data that have some form of spatial or geographic reference that allows them to be located in two or three dimensional space".) Some Geospatial Data Services are now relatively well established, for example, UKBORDERS and Digimap at EDINA and Landmap at MIMAS.
The JISC 5 year strategy has as one of its goals the building of "an on-line information environment providing secure and convenient access to a comprehensive collection of scholarly and educational material". An Integrated Information Environment (IIE) can be characterised as "the set of network or online services that support publishing and use of information and learning resources". It is underpinned by a technical architecture specifying the set of standards and protocols to be used in developing and delivering networked services to allow users to discover, access, use and publish resources as part of their learning and research activities (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/). It is recognised that interoperability is of fundamental importance and that the JISC IIE is a component of the national and global networked environment.
To date, there has been no formal geospatial interoperability study between the national data centres, or between the national data centres and users in institutions. This work is required as:
- the economic benefits of interoperability and Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) are becoming clearer and significant developments are underway both nationally and internationally.
- there is a need to understand how the UK academic sector can best exploit developments in the standards underpinning these developments.
- greater understanding is required of what is involved in supporting research and education in this important area in the future.
The benefits of interoperability have been recognised by the national data centres for several years and open standards are an integral part of many services and projects. For example, the new JISC/OS licence agreement allows other JISC funded services access via Open Geospatial Consortium interface specifications to Ordnance Survey maps and data hosted at EDINA. Internally, EDINA deploy a range of such standards based mechanisms to support service delivery.
