Thorsten Reitz
Partner
wetransform GmbH
Germany

Biography
M.Sc. Thorsten Reitz studied computer science in media. After finishing his Master’s thesis, he chose to work at Fraunhofer IGD’s Geospatial department for nearly 8 years. In this time, he was part of the coordination teams of research projects such as HUMBOLDT, eSDI-NET+ and urbanAPI. Thorsten developed the CityServer3D and the initial versions of HALE. He is furthermore Community Manager for the non-for-profit data harmonisation panel. From 2012 to 2015 he worked as a Lead Product Engineer for 3D GIS and Deputy Director at the Esri R&D Center Zurich.

Abstract
Agile Maintenance of INSPIRE Models

Co-Author: Simon Templer, Founder, wetransform GmbH

A standardized information model such as the INSPIRE schemas needs to be kept up-to-date to changing requirements and to improve the model's fit to applications. In most cases, information models are developed in top-down waterfall fashion, starting with an analysis phase, continuing with design (conceptual modeling), evaluation (Request for Comments), implementation (encoding in a physical/logical model) and then, adoption throughout the community. This leads to long standards development processes and to expensive problems in implementation, as well as mismatches to applications. As standards tend to be highly complex, such risks are manifold. An example is found in the complexity of INSPIRE standards, with thousands of complex types and hundreds of associations. To reduce risks during standards development and to enable communities to reap benefits of standards faster, we have developed a platform that provides an integrated, fast workflow from data modeling to transformation and sharing. The platform combines data modeling, transformation services and analytics with strong collaboration features to enable communities to develop and implement standards in an agile process. It is accessible and easy to use, and is still powerful enough to transform any type of structured data. Teams can use it to develop standards from scratch or to maintain them and to evaluate the impact of any change made to a model in relation other models. This workflow ensures conceptual harmonization and derives data transformation rules with defined integration quality. A particular aspect of standards modelling is the usage of Explorative UML, a variant of UML we have started to develop. Explorative UML encourages interactive model exploration on any kind of client device. In INSPIRE adoption projects, the interactive design-validate loop enabled a speedup from initial design to implementation of 10-12 times compared to phased projects. A side effect of is that the community develops transformations to target environments together with the standard.