Massimo Zotti
Head of of the Strategic Business Unit 'Government & Security'
Planetek Italia
Italy

Biography
Massimo Zotti is Head of of the Strategic Business Unit “Government & Security” of Planetek Italia s.r.l. and a passionate promoter of issues related to Geo-ICT and Earth observation. He is the representative for Planetek in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®). In 2010 he started the founding of the Italian Forum of the OGC®, which aims to encourage the sharing of issues related to the OGC® standards and interoperability among Italian members and stakeholders, and he is the founder of the Italian Group of interest on the INSPIRE Forum, which promotes initiatives related to the European Directive for the interoperability of geographic data. On his personal blog, www.massimozotti.it, he talks about Earth observation and spatial data interoperability.

Abstract
Publishing Value Added EO Products as Linked Data

Co-Author: Marco Fago, Technical Manager, Planetek Italia

The free and open data policy defined by Copernicus (the European Earth Observation programme) enriched the already wide asset of remote sensing data, thus driving the EO data in the era of Big Data. Even today, however, most of the processes aiming to the analysis of EO data and the extraction of value-added geoinformation products rely on the human ability and experience. That reduces the durability of business models based on urban and environmental monitoring, and the resilience of geostatistical indicators and metrics produced by these processes. Moreover, many of these value-added products are not spread and used in broader contexts because, although well-defined standards exist to represent them, e.g. those provided by the annexes of the INSPIRE directive - they are not yet adopted internationally as they should. Next to this, a question arises relating to the world of linked data. Despite the longstanding discussion about their importance, we cannot see yet well-established software implementations and tools that support the generation, storage and sharing of geographic data. Even ontologies for these data are not well recognized and shared at the international level, although there are many ongoing initiatives in this regard. Planetek Italia has been working for several years in this field, in order to automate the process of extraction of value-added data from the data EO, minimizing the need for human intervention in the decision-making processing chain, and providing tools for the generation and management of geographic linked data.
In particular, a major effort Planetek Italia aims at making its value added products, extracted from EO data, conform to INSPIRE and linked, through the identification of the tools, standards and best practices that will help achieve these goals. This paper will illustrate the methodologies followed to produce EO value-added products in compliance to INSPIRE, and to publish these data as linked reusing common ontologies, defined at the European level, for the thematic datasets defined by the annexes of the INSPIRE directive.