BIOHenk J. Scholten studied Mathematics and Geography at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and obtained his Ph.D. on the subject of models for housing allocation at the Faculty of Geography of the University of Utrecht (NL) in 1988. Since 1990 he is professor in Spatial Informatics at the Faculty of Economics of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Director of the Spinlab (www.spinlab.vu.nl). Prof. Scholten is founder and CEO of Geodan, one of the largest European companies specialised in Geospatial Information Technology (www.geodan.nl). On Friday April 29th, 2005, Prof. Scholten received a Royal Decoration for his significant contribution to geo-information, both on a national and international level. In July 2009 Prof. Scholten has received the ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ by Jack Dangermond, founder of ESRI. This award is given to a person who has contributed significantly to advancing the science and technology of GIS throughout his career. ABSTRACT INSPIRE and How Geodan has been Inspired, from Experiences to Expectations Geodan has been involved in the INSPIRE directives from the earliest moment, when the first questionaires were sent out about what INSPIRE should fulfill. In the beginning we were sceptic about the progress and the adoption of the programme. However, in the past years we have been impressed by the progress, we are now a strong believer. In this presentation we will give an overview of the way we have developed our INSPIRE expertise, and how we moved from research of the possibilities, towards consultancy to clients, towards developers of solutions based on the INSPIRE directives, and we became a user of the INSPIRE data sources. INSPIRE brought us a competitive edge for our work, and now it brings the possibility to make use of the data to makes this world a little bit better place to live.
BIO Giacomo Martirano is an Electronic Engineer, born in 1964, since 1990 to 1997 in the On-Board Spacecraft Systems Division at Thales Alenia Space and since 1997 co-founder and Technical Manager of Epsilon Italia, an independent SME active in the Geomatics sector. On behalf of Epsilon Italia Giacomo was/is responsible for many international projects as well as for projects implementing geomatics solutions at local level for the Public Local Authorities. He is actively involved in many INSPIRE implementations, ranging from data harmonization to network service deployment and to validation and testing. Since 2012 he is also vice-chair of CEN/TC 287. ABSTRACT SEIS & INSPIRE in action Epsilon Italia, a small enterprise specialized in geospatial technologies, is currently involved in the execution of a contract for the implementation at national level of SEIS (Shared Environmental Information System) for 5 themes: Air, Water, Soil, Noise and Radiation. The main challenge was the design of the SEIS theme-specific geodatabasesneeded for an efficient data management, focusing on the national reporting obligations set by the Environmental European Agency and the INSPIRE obligations set by the Implementing Rules on the interoperability of spatial datasets. The following main steps have been done in order to fulfill the contractual requirements:
The work, still in progress, can be seen as a practical experience of how to implement SEIS using INSPIRE.
BIO Rod Plummer, MD at Shoothill, talks about what motivated Shoothill to develop FloodAlerts, how the system was designed, how it utilises the cloud and the possibilities of its use in other parts of the world.
ABSTRACT In April 2012, following 20 months of consistently lower than average rainfall, the UK began, and continues to experience, the wettest period in its history, with many 1000’s of flood warnings being issued by the Environment Agency. FloodAlerts was launched 3 days before this rainfall began. It is the UK’s first live flood warning map, taking data sourced from the Environment Agency from over 1800 sensors around England and Wales and updating it every 15 minutes. FloodAlerts allows someone to register a monitored location and, when a flood warning is issued for that location, the user receives a notification. Since launch, the system has won the Guardian Award for Innovation, featured on the BBC and received testimonials from some of the UK’s leading politicians and Ministers. FloodAlerts is deployed on smartphones, tablets, Facebook, news sites and on the Environment Agency website itself. A commercial version of FloodAlerts is also available, allowing companies to track and monitor their assets and receive alerts during flooding instances.
Bio Ken’s diverse career of three decades in IT has included sales, consulting and relationship development in the government and corporate sectors both local and international. Since 2006 he has been Business Development Manager with Sparx Systems working closely with global standards and industry groups, providing direct support to development teams, through Sparx Systems UML modelling and design tool, Enterprise Architect. Ken, described as a positive change agent, thrives on the challenges and opportunities currently facing Geospatial, SmartGrid and e-Health. Through his commitment to education and training, he has on behalf of Sparx Systems, initiated excellence awards to promote these industries.
ABSTRACT Opportunity, Challenge and SME Innovation Legislation, standards and technology are driving industry change on a global scale. As open standards enable unprecedented levels of data interoperability and information sharing, industries, formerly independent, are recognising mutual reliance. Standards and technology are positioning the geospatial sector in new industrial constellations, where the importance of place is recognised and where collaboration and innovation are accelerating the market, for location aware solutions. Many of the advances in mobile networks are the result of government making spectrum available to industry, similar advances in location based applications can be expected from government making data available, for example, INSPIRE. A collaborative approach to education and training is essential, to ensure that the evolving geospatial sector, has the workforce capacity, to apprehend market opportunities, as they present themselves. This will require government, academia and the geospatial private sector, to co-operate in securing a sustainable share of a finite resource, - which continues to shrink, due to generation retirement - and which is also the target of Health, Smart Grid, Retail and Aviation. smeSPIRE encapsulates this imperative, and Sparx Systems, an SME itself, supports the international geospatial community agenda. We will review how we support the community in practice.
ABSTRACT Meeting the needs of SME data providers to achieve INSPIRE requirements Challenges To meet various INSPIRE implementation requirements enterprise-level software solutions are often needed by organisations to deliver the required services and datasets. As the value of a total INSPIRE implementation tends to exceed European Commission financial thresholds, the tender has to be published under European public procurement rules. Often, this results in long and complicated tendering processes that can take up considerable time and can be a drain on the already limited resources of SMEs. Many end-users are under the impression that INSPIRE solutions can only be provided by large software vendors or system integrators as a single end-to-end solution. These solutions often consist of a combination of inter-dependable, coupled components that are difficult to replace individually. End-users are therefore forced into a proprietary solution with little room to manoeuvre or to replace and upgrade individual components to better meet their organisation’s needs. Solutions Both large and small data providers need proven, flexible, enterprise-level solutions to achieve their INSPIRE requirements, at a price point that removes the time consuming and costly barriers of going to tender. Large solution providers may dominate the market however, it is often the SME technology providers themselves who have the agility to diversify and provide powerful but affordable solutions. This presentation will look at how SME solution provider Snowflake Software is removing the need for SME data providers to go through a complex and long purchasing process by providing affordable, flexible, enterprise-level desktop software and enabling end-users to get set-up and started quickly.
ABSTRACT It is recognized that, among different European Union Member States, there is a wide variety of spatial data available in the context of veterinary community. Given that, different data layers integration has shown as difficult to obtain mainly because of differences in database structures, geographical details, and spatial distribution. These differences are mostly due to data acquisition procedures, as information gathering and analysis has not been planned with the same background in mind. In order to solve these difficulties, the following paper presents an animal holding conceptual data model built under the European INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) Directive. The presented model extends the Data Specification on Agricultural and aquaculture facilities, part of the INSPIRE Annex III, moving towards a geo-referenced animal holding data management. The proposed data model has been developed by an interdisciplinary group made up of specialists in the field of Ontology, Geomatics and Veterinary, with a particular contribution of a local INSPIRE expert SME, 3DGIS srl. The aim of the project has been achieving a generic, extendable and interoperable schema, in order to embrace all kind of animal holding characterization, from a bee hive to the big poultry farm and to allow any kind of veterinary organization data to adapt the model to the nature of their legacy data. The data model allows the representation of animal holding objects at different levels of detail with the intention of discern the fundamental different patterns, processes and properties of animal holding activities. An on the field verification of the an application schema has been performed following the directives given by the EU regulation 1089/2010. Specifically, a schema mapping between the proposed model and the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie legacy data has been developed in order to test the possible spatial query, quantitative analysis and exploratory data analysis in veterinary field.
Giuseppe Conti Trilogis Srl, Rovereto (TN) Italy BIO Giuseppe Conti is CTO at Trilogis – Italy, a SME specialising in geospatial technologies, where he is also in charge for management of international activities. In the past years he has worked as senior scientist and bid manager at Graphitech – Italy a private industrial research centre, where he has been involved in a number of international projects on geospatial technologies. He holds a PhD degree from the faculty of Engineering of the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK and master's degree in Building Engineering from the University of Palermo. During his past working experiences he has been working for engineering firms in Italy and UK. ABSTRACT A non-financial cost-benefit analysis of INSPIRE: Opportunities for SMEs within a fast changing business scenario Several studies have tried calculate the Benefit-Cost Ratio (BCR) or Return on Investment (RoI) of SDIs or of INSPIRE itself, a particularly challenging topic addressed by a recent workshop hosted by JRC. In general terms, the studies agree on the long-term profitability of INSPIRE, nonetheless, assessing the true extent of its benefits is extremely complex, due to the ecosystem of implications at EU, national and local level. INSPIRE is bringing several benefits to PAs and, in turn, to SMEs, with in technical, administrative and operational implications that cannot simply be measured in financial terms. Furthermore, the combined effect of initiatives such as INSPIRE, EIS/EIF and ISA, are causing a cultural change, characterised by increased awareness –among PAs- on the importance of interoperability and data sharing (also synergising with Open Data initiatives), potentially creating further business opportunities for SMEs. It is clear that these benefits are extremely difficult to assess if considered only in economical terms, yet they will profoundly improve PAs and will create positive feedback mechanisms that will create further business opportunities, within INSPIRE and beyond. Maximising awareness over such aspects is important for European SMEs to be able exploit these opportunities to the widest possible extent.