Harmonizing geospaatial data at the local level for global benefit: HUMBOLDT Urban Atlas – a case study

Abstract

One of the major requirements for the realization of an integrated environmental monitoring system is the availability of tools and services to harmonize and integrate environmental spatial data, originating from various governmental and other agencies connected horizontally at the local level, using standards like INSPIRE, OGC, etc. Equally, the flow of information across the levels of governance in a vertical perspective from local, to regional, national and EU levels, particularly in relation to the fulfilment of specific EU reporting and monitoring requirements, is a further major focus for the development of tools and services for data harmonization. In the above context, the FP6 HUMBOLDT project provides various INSPIRE and OGC compliant state-of-the-art harmonization tools and services establishing a platform for developing cross-thematic harmonized environmental applications. In particular, the HUMBOLDT Urban Atlas scenario is an attempt to mitigate the cross-thematic harmonization challenges providing the key to unlock the prime concerns of the policy end user to secure integrated intelligence that is critical to effective decision-making and policy integration. This scenario demonstrates how non-standardized spatial environmental data from the Sustainable Observatory of the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz (CEA) becomes compliant with European standards using the HUMBOLDT framework, providing interoperable communication with other ESDIs and generating new environmental indicators at the local level. It is anticipated that there will be many similar or and even more complex examples in various other European cities, in which effective decision making is blocked by unstructured data. In such circumstances the Urban Atlas scenario results offer an excellent example of how to undertake the necessary processing steps to secure compliance to INSPIRE standards using the HUMBOLDT Framework. The Urban Atlas scenario demonstrates that the HUMBOLDT Framework provides all the necessary tools for data harmonization, even if, some processing tasks are still work in progress for HUMBOLDT Framework.

Total Document Downloads in Past 12 Months

Document Downloads

Total Document Downloads