Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) (Villa et al. 2008a,b; Villa et
al. 2009).
The INSPIRE project is an effort of the European Community to create
a common spatial data infrastructure aiming at facilitating both the sharing
of environmental spatial information among public sector organizations
and the public access to spatial information across Europe. The fulfi lment
of such a common spatial data infrastructure is a non-trivial task that
requires overcoming some fundamental issues, such as the fragmentation
of datasets and sources, the lack of harmonization between datasets and the
duplication of information. Moreover, the open standards compliance, the
defi nition of a common contract for all interfaces, and the data description
and representation constitute other key aspects addressed by INSPIRE.
In particular, for the pressing need to use wide adopted standards, the
INSPIRE Network Services SOAP Framework (Villa et al. 2008b) describes
core ideas behind the proposal of a SOAP framework for the INSPIRE
infrastructure as well as issues and solutions related to different geospatial
domains. In Villa et al. (2008b) the authors observe that although based on
open standards the existing OGC services support a mix of protocols and
technology bindings. Unfortunately, such a technology mix could slow
the integration and the implementation process, thus it should be avoided
in order to get the maximum benefi t from the offered services. Then, on
the basis of all possible solutions, risks and requirements, SOAP has been
proposed as the default communication protocol and binding technology
for the INSPIRE services. The authors (Villa et al. 2008b), also present
some criticisms to the OGC about the Consortium decisions concerning
the main aspects of a hypothetical SOAP framework, namely there is not a
common choice for data encoding, data transport and representation and
for a profi table use of SOAP Headers. The proposed INSPIRE framework
focuses on the following topics (Villa et al. 2008b):
Standard compliances
Underlying protocols binding
Use of the SOAP Header
Exception report in SOAP encoding
Data encoding style and use
Binary data transport and representation.
As for the standard compliance, beside the choice of SOAP as
communication protocol, signifi cant role is given to the Web Services
Interoperability Organization (WS-I) Basic Profile recommendations
(Ballinger et al. 2004) in order to provide the highest level of interoperability.
The WS-I Basic Profi le consists 'of a set of non-proprietary Web services
specifi cations, along with clarifi cations, refi nements, interpretations and
amplifi cations of those specifi cations which promote interoperability'.
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