Eduardo Coelho
Geographer
Novageo Solutions SA
Portugal

Abstract
A Spatial Data Infrastructure for Portuguese National Health Plan

Co-Authors:
Carla Farinha, Head of the Division of Health Statistics and Monitoring, Directorate-General of Health
Lui­s Serra, Senior Officer at the Division of Health Statistics and Monitoring, Directorate-General of Health
Maria Isabel Alves, Senior Officer at the Division of Health Statistics and Monitoring, Directorate-General of Health
Paulo Nogueira, Director of the Directorate of Analysis and Information, Directorate-General of Health

Portuguese National Health Plan (NHP) encompasses a perspective of integration and development of information systems in order to: empower the several levels of decision-making to identify potential health gains and priority interventions; monitor activity and performance of the Health System. Accordingly to these objectives, a project team focused on creating a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) to support an interactive health mapping platform, publicly available on the web. This infrastructure was designed in agreement to the INSPIRE Directive standards, particularly the metadata standards, the interoperability of spatial datasets and network services. We set out to describe the SDI behind the Portuguese interactive health mapping platform, GeoSaude. The Portuguese NHP SDI takes advantage of Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC) standards as a tool to achieve INSPIRE compliancy in three major areas: Discovery, View Services and Interoperability. The spatial datasets that are part of the NHP lie within the annex III data themes. They include spatio-temporal components, reflecting the nature of health indicators. Following INSPIRE guidelines, the data and metadata were harmonized and standardized, creating the building blocks on which software and OGC standards were applied. INSPIRE Directives concerning to full interoperability (e.g. catalogue services and view services) have been implemented with OGC standards. The created interoperable SDI can be freely accessed by health information users: querying, viewing and analyzing spatial health datasets in time, space and sex dimensions are possible. All datasets, once dispersed by several repositories, are now centralized in a single datacenter, allowing a high level of data quality. INSPIRE interoperability rules, regarding the Portuguese NHP, were supported on OGC standards and open source geospatial software. INSPIRE standardization and harmonization rules were applied. OGC standards and open source software created the platform for data discovery and visualization. The adoption of OGC compliant open source software greatly facilitated the implementation of INSPIRE Directives. INSPIRE Directives, OGC standards and open source software operating together allowed for greater interoperability, vendor independence and ease of maintenance.