69th MIG-T meeting 2022-04-01

Agenda item 

Doc(s) 

9:00 - 09:05

Welcome and approval of the agenda 

09:05 - 09:10

Actions from the previous meeting (for discussion and agreement) 

DOC Minutes - 68th MIG-T meeting

09:10 - 10:00

MIWP Action 2.3.1. Governance of INSPIRE Artefacts

• Status update
  • January releases of INSPIRE schemas and INSPIRE TGs
  • TG conversion prioritisation
  • New UML repository
• Presentation, voting and possible approval of change proposals to XML schemas and TGs
  • XML schemas:
    
    • proposal #41
    • proposal #42
    • proposal #51
    • proposal #59
    • proposal #60
    • proposal #62
    • proposal #64
  • TGs:
    • proposal #12
    • proposal #13
    • proposal #14
    • proposal #17
    • proposal #18
    • proposal #25
    • proposal #26
    • proposal #27

PRES Action 2.3.1

MIWP Action 2.3.2. Data-service linking simplification

• Consolidated proposal for data-service linking and next steps (presentation of the sub-group members)

MIWP Action 1.1. Towards a digital ecosystem for the environment and sustainability

• JRC Technical Report: Quantifying the Benefits of Location Interoperability in the European Union

• GeoPackage Good practice - initiation
• Prioritisation of additional INSPIRE Good practices
  • Candidate Good Practices (Guadaltel-Bilbomatica-Epsit)
  • Sli.do poll

PRES Technical Report

DOC GeoPackage Good Practice fiche

PRES Good Practices

MIWP Action 2.4. Central INSPIRE Infrastructure Components

• Geoportal backend based on GeoNetwork (GeoCat, tbc)
• INSPIRE Reference Validator (JRC)
• Re3gistry and INSPIRE Registry (JRC)

PRES INSPIRE Geoportal

PRES INSPIRE Validator

PRES INSPIRE Registry

Technical topics proposed by MIG-T members

• OGC API Process - File Download Service in Finland, NLS Finland

• The agenda was approved without modifications.

• The minutes of the previous meeting were approved without additional change proposals. Some actions for MIG-T members are still open and relevant, in particular relating to:
  • the nomination of experts for Actions 2.2 and 2.3.1;
  • the proposal of locations for the MIG-T physical meeting in October.

Status update

• The latest versions of INSPIRE schemas (v.2022.1) and INSPIRE TG (v.2022.1, including the TG on Metadata v.2.1.0) were released on 31 January 2022.
• A prioritisation for the conversion of TGs to the AsciiDoc format is presented. It is based on the following criteria: number of datasets available in the INSPIRE Geoportal; number of change proposals currently available in the GitHub issue tracker; number of change proposals (already endorsed by the MIG) leading to amendments in the IRs.
• A new repository for UML models was created.
• All change proposals to schemas and TGs were presented and the MIG-T members voted (also on behalf of the MIG members) for their endorsement. All proposals were endorsed without comments with the only exception being proposal #60 for schemas, where a comment from AT needs to be answered before endorsement. See the slido poll on the results of the voting process.

• The work of the temporary MIWP sub-group was presented by IT with the main emphasis on the remapping of Extended Capabilities of services (Part B of the work). A consolidated proposal was collaboratively prepared for this part by IT, NL, FR and DK, based on the agreements achieved in the meeting hold on 25th February. This work is near to be finalised.
• The envisioned approach would simplify and streamline the implementation of INSPIRE through better client support and use of the OGC standards without custom extensions.
• The MIG-T endorses the Data-service linking simplification encoding as an INSPIRE Good Practice candidate (see the slido poll results).

• JRC to coordinate a new meeting of the sub-group to finish the documentation for the consolidated proposal for Part B, as well as integrating it with the one already provided for Part A.
  
• Sub-group to initiate the Data-service linking simplification INSPIRE good practice fiche.

JRC Technical Report: Quantifying the Benefits of Location Interoperability in the European Union

• The Technical Report was published in February 2022. It was written to support different policy initiatives, mainly the Interoperable Europe initiative and the impact assessment for the upcoming Interoperable Europe Act.
• The Report provides: i) an introduction on the policy and technological context around location interoperability; ii) an analysis of 20 case studies on location interoperability providing quantifiable benefits; iii) an economic impact analysis of location interoperability in the EU.
• The final result is that the total annual impact of improved interoperability in the EU is EUR 432-625 billion, while the total annual impact of enhanced location interoperability (50-80% of the total) is EUR 272-500 billion.

GeoPackage Good Practice - initiation

• The GeoPackage encoding is submitted as a Good Practice candidate (see the GeoPackage Good Practice initiation fiche and the dedicated GitHub repository). The Good Practice work will build on previous work performed within Action 2017.2 on alternative encodings, since the UML model transformation rules (which are encoding-independent) will be reused and extended.
• A number of GeoPackage implementations for specific data themes/use cases are already available.
• The MIG-T endorses the GeoPackage encoding as an INSPIRE Good Practice candidate (see the slido poll results).

Prioritisation of additional INSPIRE Good Practices

• 3 candidate Good Practices are presented: SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC), OGC API - Records, and Vector Tiles.
• The MIG-T members voted for the prioritisation of the work: OGC API - Records was suggested as the Good Practice with the highest priority, followed by Vector Tiles and STAC (see the slido poll results).

• JRC to structure the GitHub repository for OGC API - Records as INSPIRE Discovery service and liaise with the OGC on the status and envisioned roadmap for the draft standard specifications.
• MIG-T members to share with stakeholders at the national level the results of the prioritisation initiative and consider participating in the work on the Good Practice on OGC API - Records as INSPIRE Discovery service.

• The work of the sub-group started in April 2021 and is now waiting for the adoption of the Implementing Act on high-value datasets expected in Q2 2022.
• In addition, the sub-group should discuss the update/versioning process for the list of priority datasets and the synergies with Action 2.2.

Geoportal backend based on GeoNetwork

• GeoCat and JRC are progressing well with the development work related with extending the functionality of GeoNetwork open source as backend solution for the EU INSPIRE Geoportal. 

• JRC to launch a call for testing with interested MIG-T members, once the work on GeoNetwork as backend solution for the EU INSPIRE GeoPortal is advanced (May/June 2022).

INSPIRE Reference Validator

• Version v.2022.1 was released in March 2022 (see the changelog). It includes several bugfixes and new tests on metadata to improve the discoverability of IACS data.
• New tests will be introduced in the Validator to validate resources against the latest official INSPIRE schemas (in addition to the already available schema validation against the declared schemas). The first example is available in the staging instance for the AM theme.
• Information is extracted from the validation logs and ingested in an Elasticsearch/Kibana instance, to access statistics on the use of the Validator (e.g. number of tests performed on each resource type, percentage of passed tests). Summary reports will be shared with the community in the future.

Re3gistry and INSPIRE Registry

• A major release of the Re3gistry software (version 2.3.0) was released on 10 March 2022.
• The lastest release of the software corresponds to a hotfix release (version 2.3.1), which was released on 23 March 2022.
• The launch of the INSPIRE Registry based on the latest version of the Re3gistry is expected by May 2022, once the JRC security assessment is finished.
• The handover of the maintenance and evolution of the Re3gistry software, the INSPIRE Registry and the Registry Federation Tool to the contractors of the INSPIRE Operational support contract already started.
• Activities for reusing these tools and developing a community around them are in process. To be highlighted: (a) the Publications Office of the European Union is considering the re-use of the Re3gistry for the publication of Corporate Reference Data Sets; (b) participation in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) under the umbrella of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) - more information available here.

OGC API Process - File Download Service in Finland, NLS Finland

• The NLS of Finland presents a new download service allowing users to select a dataset to download and cut it on a custom area of interest specified as a bounding box or a polygon, using the OGC API - Processes standard.
• OGC API - Processes is a REST API, based on OpenAPI specifications, is asynchronous and uses JSON encodings. There are core functionalities (used in this implementation) and extensions.
• The presentation was interrupted due to technical issues and will be given again during the next MIG-T meeting, however a video recording is available here.