Search and inventory of GIS interoperability educational resources in the Internet

Interoperability in Geographic Information Systems is increasingly getting attention within the GIS community. GIS software developers, providers and users are looking to interoperability as a silver bullet in a world of closed and proprietary systems. However, this technological change is not only a matter of software products but a question of sensibility and education of the people that has to implement this change, ranging from the software programmer of the product until the specialized end user. The broad access to the internet and its availability and immediacy has led to the ETeMII project to focus on it as a interesting educational repository. This work illustrates the most relevant issues arisen in an extensive search and inventory of GIS interoperability educational resources in the Internet. Topics such as classifications, keywords, resource types and methodological aspects are revised, whereas search results, resumed and analyzed, provide a view of the state of the art. Introduction The field of Geographical Information Sciences is subject to fast progressive changes above all as far as the technical development is concerned. A huge amount of spatial data wants to be interchanged, processed and analysed. Unfortunately non-interoperability severely limits the use of the available geographical information material at present. Most spatial data is incompatible and often in vendor-proprietary forms and Geographical Information Systems that can be found in organizations consist of isolated equipment without any possibility to interchange of data or tools with further programs or institutions. The term interoperability can be understood in a number of ways. From a technical point of view, interoperability in GIS means that software components work with each other to overcome tedious batch conversion tasks, import/export obstacles, and distributed resource access barriers imposed by heterogeneous processing environments and heterogeneous data ([OGC 1996]). Aside from the technical interoperability more and more new demands are also made on the description of the semantics of spatial data. The semantic Interoperability shall make it possible that the significance and the descriptive content of spatial data becomes understandable for all the different user groups with the objective of facilitating the exchange of information. [Kuhn, 1998], [Harvey, 1999] and [Gahegan, 1999] explain this subject in a more detailed way. Finally an Institutional Interoperability has to be brought about as well that comprises the work flow, consideration of end user dispersion and crossing institutional (national, local, organisational) barriers together with legal aspects (ETeMII, 2001; OGIS Project Technical Committee of the Open GIS Consortium, Inc, 1996 and Bishr et. al, 1999). One of the great challenges Geographical Information Sciences will have to face in the near future is therefore to achieve Interoperability in technical as well as in semantic and institutional issues. For that reason it is very important to gain a fundamental knowledge of the basic and advanced subjects of what means and how to achieve Interoperability in GIS. In this article it is attempted to elaborate a comprehensive catalogue of educational material covering all the important topics and key words related with “Interoperability in GIS”. For this overall objective it was very important to gain general experience of the working process and to develop a method with a focus on documentation which would be applicable in similar projects. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the documentary methodology we have pursued. Section 3 concentrates on the most relevant thematic aspects on Interoperability in GIS. The obtained results of the work are shown in section 4. In the latter section it is discussed the availability of the catalogue as a consultation tool in Internet. Finally this work ends with a conclusions and future developments section. Documentary methodology The search and inventory of educational resources on the Internet regarding Interoperability in GIS concerns a problem which can be solved by means of documentary processing methods. In order to carry out this processing it was made use of a more general documentary model of processing. This model has already proved 5 AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science, Palma (Balearic Islands, Spain) April 25-27 th 2002 2 to be a useful instrument in other projects. The application of the model with regard to the problem one has dealt with led finally to a model that contains the subsequent phases 1. Search. The objective of this phase is to define what to search (interoperability GI educational resources), how to search (to establish a strategy of search) and where to search (websites, databases, distribution lists). The strategy of searching is further refined into a. Search Engines, b. Websites of GIS organisations c. Clearinghouses (like virtual library) d. Querying on specialised distribution lists e. Free navigation The results of this phase are a “Search Strategy” document. 2. Inventory and brief description. The objective of this phase is to define resource identifications, resource localisations and brief resource descriptions. Every resource should have a unique identification key. It is desired that this key also expresses the location resource. The result of this phase are inventories and precatalogues of metadata. 3. Description. The objective of this phase is to obtain a metadata collection with information about found resources. The data model is based on the Dublin Core metadata standard. The tools used here are computer applications based on the metadata model and information management and search utilities. The result from this phase is a database with catalogued metadata. 4. Classification. The objective of this phase is to obtain a classified metadata collection. The tool being used is the concept map produced in the search phase. The result of this phase are classified and catalogued metadata and thematic indexes. 5. Filtering and quality control. The objective of this phase is to check and improve the quality of the metadata and the resources (quality control). The main tools being used are tools for filtering the resources. The result of this phase is a list of filtering valorisations and an enhanced version of the catalogue. 6. Report Generation. The objective of this phase is to generate project reports and to transfer the products into Word, Excel, HTML and other formats. The tools used here is a set of exporting applications. The result of this phase is a final compilation of discovered resources. The model presented here is strongly inspired by data processing systems models. This idea is not new [Hilera, 98]. However, one of the key ideas of our processing has been to separate clearly the exactly documentary processing of the data processing. The data processing system had only to develop very simple tasks, aiming at developing easily the essential documentary processes. The chosen data model keeps closely to the standard of the “Dublin Core”. A particularity of this model is that it is more extensive than the standard and enables considering both Dublin Core information and private information for internal use. For the development of a tool, the programmable database management system Microsoft Access was chosen. The fundamental reason for this decision has been that Access permits a quick development of simple applications. One has taken into account its great ergonomics when carrying out tasks as “drag and drop” showing thereby its high compatibility with other working tools.