Esa Tiainen
Senior Advisor
National Land Survey of Finland
Finland

Biography
M.Sc. Esa Tiainen, senior advisor, has extensive experience GIS, semantics and land administration. Started 1982 for City of Helsinki,1987 to Helsinki Metropolitan Area Information Management. From 1992 served National Land Survey (NLS), since 2000 at Development Centre and at 2015 Finnish Geospatial Research Institute. International - in EU-projects: EULIS; ESDIN; EULIS 2.0/LINE WP, ELF – European Location Framework 2012-; Beyond EU, SDI to Russian Federation; Arctic SDI, Integrated Land Administration, Armenia.

Abstract
Enriching SDI with Linked Data Infrastructure

Co-Author: Kai Koistinen, Spatial Data Expert, National Land Survey of Finland (NLS)

National Land Survey of Finland (NLS) is working towards a URI-based management of national spatial data infrastructure. A national recommendation under discussion suggests multiple URI linking that constitutes a framework of data infrastructure for data distribution and re-use. Piloting has successfully combined local and national data. Current view is also to establish a decentralized URI-based production of national core location data. Furthermore it allows for linking of spatial and non-spatial data. The URIs for spatial data are all minted in nationally centralized domain, paikkatiedot.fi (“spatial data.fi"), which provides redirections to the URI-services of data and service providers. Basically the URI design implies that real world entities are modeled as spatial objects in URI type "so", and as concepts in URI type "def". The real world entities are represented by URI type "id" employing a placeholder with the same namespace and local identifier as the URI of the spatial object. The "doc" URI type of a spatial object accommodates references to "id" and "def" URI types as well as representations of the spatial object (coordinate systems and encodings). The "doc" URI is implemented in RDF establishing the basis for Linked data. This enables e.g. harvesting the spatial objects representing the same concept or the same real world entity. Harmonization of the concepts is implemented in the national ontology service providing a wider Linked data framework for spatial and non-spatial data. The implementation strategy aims to that the data providers assign "def" and "id" type URIs with the same as InspireIDs for spatial objects. Accordingly the "id" URI for the real world entity is principally populated by the responsible INSPIRE data provider. For wide deployment "id" URIs are planned to be provided through the national geo-portal.