| The GIIDA (Gestione Integrata e Interoperativa dei Dati Ambientali) project is an initiative
of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR). It was launched in 2008 as an
inter-departmental project aiming to design and develop a multidisciplinary e-infrastructure
(cyber-infrastructure) for the management, processing, and evaluation of Earth and
Environmental resources –i.e. data, services, models, sensors, best practices– provided by
CNR institutes and working groups. GIIDA also acts as an interface of CNR towards
European and international interoperability programmes such as GEOSS, INSPIRE and
GMES. GIIDA cooperates with other national agencies and on-going initiatives pursuing
similar objectives in different contexts and domains, contributing to the establishment of a
national network for dialogue and resolution of issues at different scientific and technical
levels.
In keeping with GEOSS principles, the GIIDA infrastructure adopts a System of Systems
(SoS) architectural approach in order to federate the existing systems managed by a set of
recognized Thematic Areas (namely Risks, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Air Quality, Land
and Water Quality, Ocean and Marine resources) and Transversal Areas (Joint Research and
Public Administration Infrastructures, Thesaurus, Quality). The GIIDA System of
Systems will contribute to develop multidisciplinary teams studying the global
Earth system in order to address the needs coming from the GEO Societal Benefit
Areas (SBAs). According to the SoS approach every thematic area may realize an
autonomous system for thematic resource sharing. Each system is then integrated
in the GIIDA SoS through the adoption of standards and special interoperability
agreements.
In September 2010 GIIDA concluded the first phase of development with the release of its
Initial Operating Capacity (IOC). Each thematic area populated and published a catalogue
service based on OGC CSW 2.0.2 AP ISO specification. Each catalogue collects and queries
metadata of the resources provided by CNR Institutes and other GIIDA partners and relevant
to the thematic area. All the metadata relative to the published resources are compliant with
the INSPIRE Metadata Profile. Where required, a brokered approach was adopted to federate
catalogs and inventories services already available. This allowed to leverage on
existing systems, developed and maintained in the context of on-going activities
and projects, without any major change. Where possible, the resources (mainly
thematic maps, digital imagery and scientific datasets) are made accessible on-line
through standard access services such as OGC WCS, WFS, WMS and Unidata
THREDDS. This services are published by the various thematic areas through diverse
technologies such as GeoServer, GeoNetwork, Mapserver and THREDDS Data
Server.
The thematic catalogues are federated through a central clearinghouse catalogue deployed
on the CNR central site. It publishes a CSW/ISO interface and provides GIIDA global search
capabilities through distributed query and/or metadata harvesting. The federated catalogue is
available at the URL: http://giida.cnr.it/gi-cat/ , and is currently federating about 3000
resources published by the various thematic catalogues.
Every thematic area has also developed a thematic portal as a point-of-access to
domain-specific information (documents, news, datasets, etc.). The thematic portal content is
under the control of the Thematic Area coordinator. The thematic portals are reachable from a
GIIDA central geo-portal which acts as the single point-of-access to all GIIDA relevant
information and provides data query and access capabilities through a Graphical User
Interface.
The GIIDA current activities include enrichment of the existing capacity with new
resources (e.g. datasets, access services, visualisation services). The GIIDA Working Group
is also experimenting the broadening of the catalogue brokering capabilities to the Sensor
Web Enablement (SWE) services, in particular with the SOS services already published the
Thematic Areas. In the scope of the test and evaluation activities of the IOC infrastructure,
GIIDA is conducting interoperability tests with other national infrastructures such as
SINAnet (ISPRA) and COI/ENEA.
For the second phase, the project is planning the definition of a GIIDA Data Policy based
on the GEOSS Data Sharing Principles, and the INSPIRE Data Sharing Implementing Rules.
Advanced functionalities will be also implemented such as service chaining, quality control
and multi-scale features. Moreover GIIDA will work for the development of selected
cross-disciplinary Use Scenarios to test and evaluate the current and future infrastructure
capabilities. |