Jurgen Walther
Geospatial Infrastructure Services Officer
Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG)
Germany

Biography
Jürgen Walther: Geospatial Infrastructure Services, Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) in Frankfurt/Main. Diploma geography in 1992. Freelancer within ecological studies. Further education on UNIX, Network, Databases. Database programming and analysis. Since 2001 at BKG engaged in metadata standards, lead of working group on metadata, implementation of the german catalogue, geoportal, SDI, pilot project on geocoding, development of use cases and appropriate combinations of thematic maps, provision of special products, solutions, support of SDI implementations at federal level.

Abstract
Connecting SDI to an Open Data Portal – The German Technical Adapter

The advancement of the open government is a goal the govdata.de portal is made for. It provides an infrastructure and makes open data findable and available. Hence the govdata portal is an important internet application for bringing open spatial data into use. Because of different data formats respectively metadata standards the systems were not compatible. The following chapters describe our project for the implementation of an adapter to connect the german SDI to the open data portal. Govdata.de uses the metadata structures of CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network) which is a de-facto-standard for open data catalogue software. The CKAN metadata are interchanged in the JSON format. Key content includes name, title, description, resource, licence and contact. A JSON schema for open government data has been developed. The SDI metadata structure ISO 19139 and the inspire requirements are quite different from the above named JSON notation. Hence the first step was to agree a mapping of the content of govdata and ISO 19139. The completion of the mapping table needed a lot of translation work. Next step was to agree to metadata conventions inside the SDI community. Especially the usage of open data compliant licences as well as the need of improvement of the INSPIRE TG based on EN ISO 19115 and EN ISO 19119 was a big problem. The completion of the technical adapter (written in Python) came by end of the year 2014. This tool is productive and SDI metadata are uploaded daily into the govdata portal.