Workshop goal and target audience

On 3-4 July 2019, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) will be hosting a 1.5-day workshop on making spatial data discoverable through mainstream search engines in Ispra, Italy.

The workshop will be focusing on technical issues so is mainly dedicated to web developers, spatial data publishers and search engine optimisation (SEO) experts who are willing to share their experience related to search engines indexing optimisations when publishing spatial data and learn about experience of other MS.

Limited funding is available to cover travel costs for participants (where needed).

Why this workshop?

After some discussions at the MIG-T meeting in Paris, the MIG-T decided to organise a workshop to:

The workshop will also discuss proposals for possible follow-up actions under the MIG-T activity on making INSPIRE data discoverable through mainstream search engines.

The gathered good practices, open issues and suggestions for follow-up activities will be summarised in a workshop report.

Call for abstracts

We are inviting proposals for presentations on experiences with search engine optimisation for geospatial data and related topics, including (but not limited to):

Presentations can be of two types:

The presentation proposal should include:

The abstracts should be sent to andrea.perego@ec.europa.eu and Marcin.Grudzien@gugik.gov.pl. The deadline for submissions has been extended to 10 May 2019.

Participants will be notified about acceptance/rejection of their proposals by 17 May.

Important dates

Context & background

In 2017, OGC and W3C jointly published the Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices. This document identifies 14 best practices / recommendations that are applicable to the publication of spatial data on the Web. These best practices cover different aspects of spatial data publication like: data formats, access, licensing, metadata, identifiers, etc.

As a follow-up, the European Commission under ELISE initiative published Spatial Data on the Web tools and guidance for data providers, which assesses the INSPIRE framework against the aforementioned best practices, identifies gaps, and finally provides recommendations how to seal those gaps. The document recognises 4 out of 14 best practices that are crucial for successful spatial data infrastructure (SDI) implementation. One of those is Best practice 2: make your spatial data indexable by the search engines. It signifies the importance of making spatial resources discoverable by non-expert users via search engines.

Since this recommendation is often not (fully) considered when developing SDIs, the MIG-T decided to launch a dedicated activity on making INSPIRE data discoverable through mainstream search engines. One of first actions within the activity was to organise Google Dataset Search (GDS) workshop during the 2018 INSPIRE conference in Antwerp. The GDS workshop introduced the concept of annotating landing pages with code snippets that are recognised by Google crawlers ant thus indexed. This concept has been tested by several spatial dataset providers in Europe and proved to be working as advertised.

However, GDS though important is only one of many tools/techniques that optimise spatial data to be indexed by search engines.