Standards and

Interoperability

Nasr Khashoggi

General Manager

Geographic Technology Trading

Fourth National GIS Symposium in Saudi Arabia

From Desktop GIS to enterprise Location Intelligence;

architecture and open standards

Pre-Symposium Workshop hosted by Pitney Bowes Business Insight and

Geographic Technology Trading

Agenda

• Why adhere to standards?

• Technical standards

• Database interoperability

• Standards and centralised data in Madinah

Bringing GIS to the enterprise:

Standards and Interoperability

• Standards and Interoperability are increasingly important with the

move to the enterprise and Location Intelligence

• Fundamental in bidding for public sector tenders

• “The challenge of e-Government is to make location-based data,

created in one department, available to others, promoting greater

information sharing between departments and other agencies and,

ultimately, to the citizen.”

- MapInfo e-government White Paper

• Traditional GIS part of a larger solution

• Requires

– Open Standards

– Interoperability

– Open access to data

What does TMA stand for?

TOO MANY ACRONYMS!!!

Maybe, BUT…

Technical standards make large scale implementations

easier and reduce risk

Why adhere to Standards?

• Standards help us to understand each other

• Standards protect customers’ existing investment in people, skills and infrastructure

– Reduce training costs and time

– Existing investment in software can be re-used for any new technology introduced

• Standards work against vendors that lock customers into proprietary formats and technology

– In the public sector data creation and management costs can often exceed 80% of any GIS project

– Data becomes THE asset

• Organizations such as ISO and OGC consider how our customers use software when specifying interfaces. This helps us direct the features, functionality and deployment options of our products.

• Standards represent good engineering practice and in-turn better products for our customers.

PBBI and Standards

• IT Standards

– .Net

– Java

– ODBC/OCI

– SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)

– WSDL (Web Service Definition Language)

• ISO

– TC 211 of particular interest for geospatial.

– MapInfo helped to lead ISO efforts for adding spatial to SQL

(simple feature access).

– Quality Assurance - MapInfo Business Applications team fully

ISO9001 accredited

• OGC

– MapInfo has always believed that data exchange should be

simple, transparent, and open.

– Principal member of the OGC since 1995

– MapInfo Chief Executive on the OGC board

Envinsa and Standards

• .NET and Java APIs

freely available

• REST interface

• SOAP/WSDL

• WMS

• WFS

• XML

• ODBC

• JDBC

• SNMP

• The list continues!

OpenLS Initiative

The goal of the OpenLS (www.openls.org) Initiative is to develop specifications

and standards needed to support the implementation of the location services

invoked by mobile or wireless Internet

Such standards are meant to support the growth of consumer markets by

ensuring that the wealth of public and private sector location information and

application resources are available for use by both developers and consumers

of mobile applications and location services. The OpenLS Initiative will harness

the business requirements of industry-leading organizations to drive a

cooperative industry development project on which standardization

As a Principal Member of the OGC, MapInfo is an active participant in technical

and management activities of the Consortium. Through its participation in the

OpenLS, MapInfo will provide precise recommendations to assist Initiative

sponsors in the development of specifications that will benefit the entire location-

aware industry.

George Moon, CTO and group vice president, research and development,

MapInfo. Said : "MapInfo realizes the importance of developing universal

standards that will help increase the speed of integration and improve the

functionality of location-aware applications for years to come."

Open Location Services Specification (OpenLS)

• OpenLS defines 6 core services that satisfy the most common requirements of

these applications:

1. Directory Service - provides access to an online directory to find the

location of a specific or nearest place, product or service.

2. Gateway Service - fetches the position of a subscriber using the OMA

Mobile Location Protocol.

3. Presentation Service - renders a base map made up of geospatial data with

a set of overlays.

4. Route Service - Determines travel routes and navigation information

between two or more points.

5. Geocoder Service - transforms a description of a location into a point. For

example, a postal address is transformed into a latitude / longitude pair.

6. Reverse Geocoder Service - transforms a position into a location synonym,

such as postal address or street intersection.

• All are EnvinsaTM web services

• 1-4 to be implemented in Madinah

• Geocode & Reverse Geocoder are combined to create the EnvinsaTM Location

Utility, which is not yet available for Saudi Arabia.

What is Interoperability?

• The ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together (inter-

operate).

• With respect to software, the term interoperability is used to describe the

capability of different programs to exchange data via a common set of

exchange formats, to read and write the same file formats, and to use the

same protocols

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoperability

• Sharing and using the same data and services

• In the world of GIS and Mapping Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifies

the standards, for example WMS, WFS and GML

Open data access

• "MapInfo is fully dedicated to providing software that enables users to

easily create, provide, and share geographic data with other users."

-George Moon, former CTO

• Move away from proprietary data formats

• SpatialWareTM for SQL Server

– Not middleware!

– Extension to database/SQL capabilities

• Oracle, Informix

• Industry Cooperation

– MapInfo, Intergraph, Autodesk & Laser Scan built Oracle

Interoperability Kit

– Different software tools across departments

– One database – multiple applications

Challenges

• Reading the data

• Placing the data on the Earth

• Displaying the data

• Editing the data

Reading the data

• The data can be read directly or it can be imported

• Often a direct read will also translate the data into the proprietary format. This

will make is faster to access and search

• Importing the data will often mean that the connection between the original data

and the imported data is lost

– = updating the original data is not possible

ODBC and OCI

• ODBC – Open DataBase Connectivity

• OCI – Oracle Call Interface

• OCI is used when connecting to Oracle 9i, 10g or 11g for spatial data

• ODBC is used when connecting to any ODBC compatible database

• ODBC can also be used for connecting to older versions of Oracle or when

using non-spatial data

Placing the data on the Earth

• Al Khobar Corniche

• X: 50.2204° Y: 26.3305°

– Longitude / Latitude (WGS 84)

• X: 5,590,511m Y: 3,021,129m

– Mercator WGS 84

• Requires interoperability between clients and database vendors.

Displaying the data

• Styles are often very specific to the software

• Some data formats does not contain any style information, for instance ESRI

Shape and Oracle SDO_GEOMETRY

• The style must be applied afterwards by the application.

– Could be done as a thematic based on a attribute.

– The style can be a global style for the entire dataset (table)

– Or the style is stored as an attribute with the data. This might require that

each application stores its own style.

Editing the data

• Be able to both read and write the format

• Data only edited in the original format

• Several users accessing and editing the same data. Potential conflicts.

• Best to inherit the benefits of a spatial RDBMS

Solutions • Spatial databases

– Oracle Locator / Oracle Spatial

– MS SQL Server 2008 Spatial

– PostgreSQL with PostGIS

– Clients must be able to read/write these formats

– Styles must be handled by the individual clients

• Web Feature Service with Transactions (WFS-T)

– Servers

• MapXtreme, Envinsa

– Clients

• MapInfo Professional 9.5, MapXtreme

– Clients must be able to read/write these formats

– Styles must be handled by the individual clients

Madinah Project: Goals

1. Evolve the current GIS to a modern platform

2. Adhere to standards

3. Implement a Service Oriented Architecture that is robust and secure

4. Develop new GIS applications based on this new system

5. Train Municipality staff on the new applications

ISO Standards approved by Saudi Law

So far 28 ISO Geospatial

Standards has been approved

by the Saudi Arabian

Standards Organization

(SASO), and more under

study.

Standards in Madinah

• Oracle 10g

– SDO_Geometry data storage

– OCI connections

• Envinsa

– Able to read data from various data sources (incl. Oracle)

– Extensible Data Provider

– Web Service based for multi-client access

• Metadata web services

– Supports ISO19115 profile

• ISO 19115:2003 defines the schema required for describing geographic information and services. It provides information about the identification, the extent, the quality, the spatial and temporal schema, spatial reference, and distribution of digital geographic data.

• Standards-based communications between platform and business services

• .NET / Java / REST APIs

• Easily deployabla web applications

• Support for existing browsers

– Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox etc

OGC support in Madinah

• Web Map Services (WMS) served by Envinsa platform and consumed by client

applications

– Web Map Service Interface Standard (WMS) provides a simple HTTP interface for

requesting geo-registered map images from one or more distributed geospatial

databases. A WMS request defines the geographic layer(s) and area of interest to be

processed. The response to the request is one or more geo-registered map images

(returned as JPEG, PNG, etc) that can be displayed in a browser application. The

interface also supports the ability to specify whether the returned images should be

transparent so that layers from multiple servers can be combined or not.

• Web Feature Services (WFS) served by Envinsa platform and consumed by client

applications

– Web Feature Service Interface Standard (WFS) defines an interface for specifying

requests for retrieving geographic features across the Web using platform-

independent calls. The WFS standard defines interfaces and operations for data

access and manipulation on a set of geographic features

• OGC Catalog Service implemented for Metadata

– Catalogue Services Interface Standard (CAT) supports the ability to publish and

search collections of descriptive information (metadata) about geospatial data,

services and related resources. Providers of resources use catalogues to register

metadata that conform to the provider's choice of an information model; such models

include descriptions of spatial references and thematic information. Client applications

can then search for geospatial data and services in very efficient ways.

Metadata

Data about

data

EU example: INSPIRE

• INSPIRE lays down general rules to establish an

infrastructure for spatial information in Europe for the

purposes of Community environmental policies and policies

or activities which may have an impact on the environment

• It should not require collection of new data

• It does not affect intellectual property rights

• It will be written into UK law

Aims of Inspire

• Spatial data should be collected once and maintained at the level where this

can be done most effectively,

• It must be possible to combine seamlessly spatial data from different

sources across the EU and share it between many users and applications,

• It must be possible for spatial data collected at one level of government to be

shared between all the different levels of government

• Spatial data needed for good governance should be available at conditions

that are not restricting its extensive use,

• It should be easy to discover which spatial data is available, to evaluate its

fitness for purpose and to know which conditions apply for its use.

INSPIRE: Beyond Metadata

• Implementing Rules for:

– Metadata

– Data specifications (interoperability)

– Network services & Infrastructure

– Data sharing Methodology

– Monitoring and Reporting

Metadata enables more than just sharing…

• Enables department or organisations to find data they otherwise may not realise exist.

• Identify data relevant to the business task at hand.

• Make informed decisions based on an understanding of the quality of the data they are accessing

• Data can be shared more efficiently promoting joined-up working

• Data can be expensive to buy, create and manage. Metadata can prevent data duplication and superfluous datasets

• Makes data pervasive across organisation

Architecture and Standards

• The SOA architecture planned for Madinah will ensure:

– Reliability

– Performance

– Security

– Future Proofing

• Standards are key!

– Protected investment for the customer

– Fixed requirements for PBBI

– Universal understanding of communications

Results for Madinah

• Centralisation of all GIS business processes and datasets,

providing consistent quality of service and quality of data to all

GIS users.

• Vastly more efficient data management processes due to

centralised datasets.

• Secure access control over all resources and data within the

proposed system.

• New and enhanced functionality such as routing, gazetteer

searching and OGC web services.

• Standards-based development of all services and data to

ensure future expandability.

• A scalable and robust Services Oriented Architecture.

Thank you