The Spatial Database: More Sharing and Bigger Scale
It’s always exciting to see what users are doing with the latest tools and technologies in the geospatial world; I’ve certainly enjoyed the chance to watch presentations from our users at the FME User Conference last month. We’ve been sharing a few of these over the last weeks and this week is no exception.
One of the trends I’ve noticed is that data is increasingly being shared, and that it’s more common for solutions to depend on different kinds of input data. Differences between applications, formats, data models, software versions, and political boundaries can be formidable challenges, but there is a huge motivation to overcome them and the types of solutions are getting bigger. (I love this quote from Bill Oates who is frustrated with data silos) A great example of one of these large-scale solutions is the EU’s INSPIRE Directive. INSPIRE joins a large set of other Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) projects and its scope (geographic size, number of administrative areas, detailed data models) is very ambitious (this article talks about Lithuania’s experience with INSPIRE).
For this week, I’d like to point you to a great presentation from our UC by Mark Döring. He describes solutions con terra is building to break down data silos and enable existing systems to easily interoperate with INSPIRE. What examples of large scale data sharing have you witnessed?
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