Standardized data sharing through an open-source Spatial Data Infrastructure: the Afromaison project

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Standardized data sharing through an

open-source Spatial Data

Infrastructure: the Afromaison project

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EcoARM2ERA and AFROMAISON

Why Afromaison in this workshop?

• Concrete example of spatial data management

• Demonstration of geographic standards and tools that

can be useful to other projects

• Our Armenian partners know these tools and

standards through the ARPEGEO project

• ARPEGEO = National scale whereas

Afromaison = Continental scale

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AFROMAISON - CONTEXT

- 3 years project (2011-2014), financed by the European

Commission (FP7 projects)

- 15 partners, including 6 from Africa

- Theme: Integrated Natural Resources Management (INRM)

in 5 different eco-regions of Africa => 5 case studies

- Afromaison: Afro  Africa

Maison  “house” in French

=> landscape should be managed like a household (several people with different roles and interests under a same roof)

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- Integrated Natural Resources Management:

natural resources management must take into account interests of all the actors (population, water managers, farmers, …) by bringing technical solutions and using local knowledge

- Meso-scale:

• Scale where decisions taken

• Sub-national, between local and national

• Ecosystem, administrative unit, watershed, … - Goal:

to produce a manual and a toolbox gathering results of the 3 years research for a better INRM, usable in all

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AFROMAISON - CONTEXT South Africa Uganda Ethiopia Mali Tunisia 5 case study 5 different contexts: - Environmental - Socio-political

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- INRM:

• need of existing base data: climate, population, land cover, …

• Need to share available + created data with partners

• Later need to share data with public to avoid redundancy

 Data need to be discoverable, accessible and usable

Principle of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)

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AFROMAISON - STANDARDS

We are concerned by 2 families of standards:

• Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC): responsible

for open standards for geospatial content and services, GIS data processing and data sharing. Ex: WMS, WFS, WCS, WPS, KML, …

• International Standards Organisation (ISO):

responsible for the ISO19115/ISO19139

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African context for SDI and GIS:

- Weaknesses:

• Internet connectivity • Electrical network • Hardware

• Budget

• GIS skills slowly increasing compared to other places

- Strengths/Opportunities:

• Local willingness of capacity building for being able to

locally address issues

• Strongly SDI committed continental institution: UNECA • Several European projects linked to Africa

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AFROMAISON - SOLUTIONS - TOOLS

- Only Open Source solutions for Afromaison

- Has all technical solutions needed

- It allows to address some of the difficulties such as budget Server (unige/GRID) FTP server OpenGEO Suite Geonetwork GI-Cat (broker) Afromaison SDI:

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AFROMAISON - TOOLS

FTP server:

• Main system to store & access Afromaison geospatial data physical files

• Advantages:

- Easy access to big files => ideal to store and exchange big data (vector, raster) between partners

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OpenGEO suite:

• Suite of integrated Java modules forming a web mapping platform

• Allows to easily control the whole chain of geodata on the web (import  publication)

• Compliant with OGC standards

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PostGIS

Extension of the PostgreSQL database to allow the management of geographic functionalities and queries

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GeoServer

• Cartographic server

• Core element of the OpenGEO Suite, that

allows to import, manage and publish spatial data (vector or raster)

• Can read many formats

- Files (shapefiles, geoTIFF, …)

- Databases (PostGIS, ArcSDE, Oracle, …)

• Publishes imported maps in a standardized way (OGC

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Afromaison layers in geoserver

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Afromaison webservices published from geoserver WMS: http://afromaison.grid.unep.ch/geoserver/wms WFS: http://afromaison.grid.unep.ch/geoserver/wfs WCS: http://afromaison.grid.unep.ch/geoserver/wcs

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GeoWebCache

• Helps to accelerate images and

data display

• Uses some other OGC standards:

- WMTS: Web Map Tiling Service - WMS-C: Web Map Service Caching - TMS: Tiled Map Service

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OpenLayers

• Javascript library allowing to display

maps and linked functions in a web browser

• Can display image formats such as WMS, WMTS,

TMS, WMS-C, WMTS, Google Maps, Bing Maps,

Yahoo Maps, OpenStreetMap, ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS

• Can display the following vector formats: KML,

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GeoExt

• Javascript library providing the

necessary tools to build web mapping applications

• Example: GeoExplorer, vizualisation tool coming with

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http://afromaison.grid.unep.ch/geoexplorer/composer#maps/4

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Integration of a GeoExplorer composition in a web page:

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Geonetwork

- Metadata = necessity to describe geographic data

- Spatial data on the web  metadata must be on the web

=> metadata catalog

- Geonetwork = metadata catalog

- Allows to search and access data - ISO19139 standard

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Afromaison geonetwork node:

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Afromaison broker

-Need to be able to discover and expose as much african geodata

as possible

- Problem: they might be published in different formats (WMS, WFS, CSW,

THREDDS, NetCDF, Hydro, WaterML, …)

- Solution: a broker (or connector) that allows to transform the result of

heterogeneous queries into an homogeneous interface

- Developed in the EuroGEOSS project by ESSI-Lab

- installation of GI-Cat for Afromaison => 15 African resources at the moment - will be transferred to UNECA in November as a federator of African resources

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AFROMAISON - TOOLS Afromaison broker http://afromaison.grid.unep.ch:8080/gi-cat/gi-portal/index.jsp - Source - Metadata _{Access to} data

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AFROMAISON - GEOSS

- Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) =

Google for geodata

- Developed by the Group on Earth Observation (GEO)

- allows to connect users to existing databases and portals

by registering them

- GEOportal available at http://www.geoportal.org

- Afromaison services registered and accessible directly

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AFROMAISON - GEOSS

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AFROMAISON - Conclusion

- This project shows a successful example of participation to

better data sharing in Africa

Hope to save time for real work instead of re-create existing data

- Knowledge about use of these tools will be transmitted soon

to local partners

=> African geodata managed by Africans

- Same principles and tools have been used in Armenia through ARPEGEO and same success!

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