Removing Technical Barriers

Studies to optimize the availability of INSPIRE and open data via the UBA metadata catalog

The German Environment Agency (UBA) maintains and provides several databases for their reporting activities and projects. During the INSPIRE directive implementation, they provided environmental data subjected to reporting requirements via their spatial data infrastructure “UBA.gdi”. The emergence of new technologies (e.g., OGC API for Features) eases the use of geospatial data significantly. Thus, this project investigates current technological approaches that can complement the measures implemented in recent years. The goal is to improve the retrieval of UBA’s data stocks and remove technical barriers to (re)using the data itself.

con terra and 52°North collaborate to develop solutions and an implementation strategy based on the existing technologies in UBA.gdi. Resulting exemplary implementations that demonstrate feasibility, in terms of the INSPIRE Directive requirements and simple data access from the user’s perspective, will be available to each project subarea at the end of the project. Our developers investigate how to enhance existing OGC-compliant Web Feature Services to support the new OGC API for Features interface and evaluate an enhancement of the UBA’s existing air quality Sensor Observation Service instance with an OGC SensorThings API module. We examine the combined use of OGC API Features and SensorThings API and will use the INSPIRE data theme “Environmental Monitoring Facilities” in a simplified form for an alternative encoding. This we will combine with air measurement data delivered via the SensorThings API.

First results comprise a mapping between the UBA’s current Sensor Web database and the SensorThings API data model. We also created an initial running prototype of an OGC API for Features instance based on the ldproxy.

con terra GmbH, Germany, https://www.conterra.de/