Digital transformation is at core of Europe’s future and the importance of data is well highlighted by the recently published European strategy for data, which envisions the establishment of ...so-called European data spaces enabling seamless data flows across actors and sectors to ultimately boost the economy and generate innovation. Integrating datasets produced by multiple actors, including citizen-generated data, is a key objective of the strategy. This study focuses on OpenStreetMap (OSM), the most popular crowdsourced geographic information project, and is the first step towards an exploration of pros and cons of integrating its open-licensed data with authoritative geospatial datasets from European National Mapping Agencies. In contrast to previous work, which has only tested data integration at the local or regional level, an experiment was presented to integrate the national address dataset published by the National Land Survey (NLS) of Finland with the corresponding dataset from OSM. The process included the analysis of the two datasets, a mapping between their data models and a set of processing steps – performed using the open source QGIS software – to transform and finally combine their content. The resulting dataset confirms that, while addresses from the NLS are in general more complete across Finland, in some areas OSM addresses provide a higher detail and more up-to-date information to usefully complement the authoritative one. Whilst the analysis confirms that an integration between OSM and authoritative geospatial datasets is technically and semantically feasible, future work is needed to evaluate enablers and barriers that also exist at the legal and organisational level.
In this paper we investigate the benefits of binary data serialization as a means of storing and sharing large amounts of geospatial data in an interoperable way. De-facto text-based exchange ...encodings typically exposed by modern Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), including eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), are generally inefficient for an increasingly higher number of applications due to their inflated volumes of data, low speed and the high computational cost for parsing and processing. In this work we consider comparisons of JSON/Geospatial JSON (GeoJSON) and two popular binary data encodings (Protocol Buffers and Apache Avro) for storing and sharing geospatial data. Using a number of experiments, we illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches for common workflows that make use of geospatial data encodings such as GeoPackage and GeoJSON. The paper contributes a number of practical recommendations around the potential for binary data serialization for interoperable (geospatial) data storage and sharing in the future.
The role of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) to integrate, update or complement authoritative datasets released by governments has become increasingly important. This work analyses the ...contribution of OpenStreetMap (OSM), the most popular VGI project, as one of the input sources that the Military Geographic Institute (IGM), one of the Italian governmental mapping agencies, has used for producing the National Summary Database (DBSN). This database, which was recently released for 12 out of the 20 Italian regions, has a schema organised into a hierarchical structure composed of 10 layers, 30 themes and 93 classes, where each geospatial object carries information on the specific data source it was derived from. For each DBSN layer and theme, we first calculated the fraction of objects derived from OSM in all the Italian regions and related provinces. We found a heterogeneous picture with OSM contribution generally being limited, with the exception of few regions and layers/themes where the DBSN was almost exclusively derived from OSM. An in-depth comparison between the DBSN and OSM building datasets showed that OSM building completeness is varying across Italian regions and provinces, but in all regions there are buildings in OSM that are not included in the DBSN. The work shed light on the opportunities and obstacles for OSM to become a primary input source for the production of governmental datasets.
Preface: Workshop “Openness in Geospatial and Remote Sensing” Minghini, M.; Anghelea, A.; Camboim, S. ...
International archives of the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences.,
12/2023, Volume:
XLVIII-1/W2-2023
Journal Article, Conference Proceeding
The beginning of our century has seen the rise of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) and crowdsourced geographic information projects. This study analyses and compares the most relevant initiatives ...for Europe in both contexts: INSPIRE, the Directive aiming to establish a pan-European SDI used for environmental policies, and OpenStreetMap (OSM), the largest and richest crowdsourced geospatial database. Similarities and differences, advantages and disadvantages of the two initiatives from an end user perspective are presented for a number of characteristics: underlying approach and governance, spatial scope, data structure and encoding, data access, and licensing framework. Overall, both initiatives have developed specific strengths and have achieved different types and degrees of interoperability, which would make their integration highly beneficial to multiple stakeholders. From the pure technical perspective, such integration is fully enabled by the maturity of the available FOSS4G, which offers specific support for both INSPIRE and OSM resources, also reviewed in the paper.
Recent years have seen a tremendous increase of digital Earth Observation (EO) infrastructures, which provide web-based environments for accessing and processing data in a highly automated and ...scalable way. However, the current landscape of EO infrastructures and initiatives is fragmented, with various levels of user on-boarding and uptake success. The current work aims to make sense of this complex landscape by providing two main contributions. First, it offers a classification scheme used to review and analyse more than 150 EO infrastructures and initiatives. Then, adopting a user-centric perspective, the main limitations and obstacles currently faced by users when working with the existing EO platforms are identified. For each of these limitations, we propose a number of good practices that could benefit, from a user point of view, the design and functioning of EO platforms. Some technological enablers, i.e. specific resources (such as software components, standards and data encodings) that emerged from the analysis as holding a great potential for improving the usability of existing EO platforms, are finally listed. The work aims to provide a first scientific insight on how to best design and operate EO platforms to maximise the benefits of their user communities.
The European Commission (EC), being the co-lead of the European Regional Group on Earth Observations (EuroGEO), is currently outlining an ecosystem that will interconnect European technologies, ...digital infrastructures and data and enable the implementation of policy-relevant use cases using shared standards. This ecosystem will in turn strengthen Europe’s contribution to GEOSS, which is the Global Earth Observation System of Systems. To evaluate and demonstrate the potential of this ecosystem, prioritization of use cases is necessary. This work presents a methodology for this prioritization, taking into consideration policy relevance, data and digital infrastructures and adherence to European approaches, principles and values. This methodology can also be used for identifying noteworthy research projects in the Earth observation (EO) domain that possess policy relevance and have the potential to be transformed into sustained and operational services beyond the funding period, focusing on research projects funded by Horizon 2020 (H2020) and Horizon Europe EU Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation. We applied this methodology to an H2020 project named “EuroGEO Showcases: Applications Powered by Europe (e-shape)”, composed of 37 pilots, and here we present the results. This process led to the identification of a priority pilot on solar energy potential assessment in urban areas, for which EC Knowledge Centre on Earth Observation (KCEO) will participate in co-design activities with ARMINES, the leader of this pilot. We finally present the pilot shortly and elaborate on the next steps.
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the most popular crowdsourced geographic information project. The main factor that still limits the practical use of OSM is the lack of quality assurance. OSM quality ...assessment is thus a well-studied topic in literature, with most of the studies evaluating the quality by comparison against reference datasets. In contrast to these extrinsic approaches, OSM intrinsic assessment evaluates the quality by only analysing OSM itself. This study contributes to OSM intrinsic assessment by introducing an open source procedure to evaluate the temporal accuracy, up-to-dateness and lineage of OSM. Two workflows are presented: the first allows accessing the historical evolution of single OSM objects through an interactive web application, while the second aggregates and stores results on a user-defined grid to enable further GIS processing. The methodology is applied on the OSM nodes in the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, by computing the following measures on the cells of an hexagonal grid: total number of nodes, average date of creation and last edit of nodes, average update frequency of nodes, average number of versions of nodes, average and total number of different contributors on nodes. Results highlight the mapping dynamics driven by the Dar Ramani Huria project, focused on increasing flood preparedness and resilience. When moving from the peripheral areas to the city centre, OSM is characterized by a progressively higher density of nodes, created earlier in time and updated by a higher number of contributors, which are all indexes of a general higher data quality.
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