Speakers Bio & Abstract

Biography
Pekka Latvala is a Research Scientist working at the department of Geoinformatics and Cartography in the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute in the National Land Survey of Finland. His area of expertise is interoperability and geospatial web services.Abstract
Using the Data Exchange Layer of the Finnish National Architecture for Digital Services for Transporting WFS and WMS QueriesThe National Architecture for Digital Services in Finland is an infrastructure used for exchanging information between different services and organizations. Part of the National Architecture is a data exchange layer that will be implemented with the X-road platform, developed in Estonia where it is currently in wide use. The data exchange layer uses the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) for handling the communication between the services. The aim of the project described in this paper is to deliver data from spatial services currently provided according to the OGC?s WFS and WMS interfaces, through the national data exchange layer. For this purpose we developed adapter web services that package the WFS and WMS queries and their responses into the SOAP format and unpack them to the original queries and response formats after the data has been transferred. The adopted use case is a situation where a potential buyer of a summer cottage can explore the area on a map, together with several spatial data themes. All data sets are provided by different governmental organizations participating in the project, and delivered through the national data exchange layer. Spatial content applied in the use case include cadastral parcels, soil, water quality, weather, climate and forest berry layers, displayed either on top of satellite image or topographic map background. A conclusion from the project is that images are difficult to transfer efficiently. The main benefits provided by the data exchange layer include improved security, access control and usage traceability.