- What is going to happen?
- Whatever you can make happen...
How did it come into being? Paul Smits from the JRC approached Andrea Giacomelli and me at the last OGC TC meeting in Frascati, Italy and asked whether we would be interested in helping to organize an Open Source Mash-Up at the upcoming INSPIRE conference in Krakow. We both confirmed that this is an excellent idea and that we would be delighted to help organize it. Andrea suggested that a motto would help to get people interested and came up with "Biodiversity". He started to put together the description of the event and launched a call for participation. Old bad me did not do anything much except talk to people about it wherever I met them because I have business (but that is another story).
Who is organizing this? Currently "we" are the JRC and OSGeo and we try to address a broad group of stakeholders ranging from the lone techie developer through environmental experts with a spatial problem on their hands right up to the business executive of the European NMCAs (National Mapping and Cadastre Agencies), EEA (European Environmental Agency) and whoever else thinks that they can contribute or take away something. It will be interesting to understand what the the motivations of the participants are but that angle of a stakeholder analysis will have to wait until after the event. Lets have a look at the initiating parties.
What is the JRC? It is the "Joint Research Center" and no, they do not research the effects of THC on scientist's brains but they "enable" INSPIRE. They have been tasked by the commission to provide an infrastructure and organizational framework enabling experts, users and managers to design the European (environmental) SDI. Mind me: INSPIRE is not the JRC! INSPIRE is aprocess. Regardless of what this means in detail it has become obvious that the few INSPIRE folks in JRC are hopelessly over tasked. Organizing the design of Europe's spatial data is a Titan's job. No matter how good and industrious the INSPIRE crew is, they are humans, not Titans. Europe's spatial data as a whole is way to large, heterogeneous and non-ingeniously organized to get anywhere fast. It has grown literally over hundreds of years and with IT becoming commonplace a legacy of technological silos emerged. These we have to unite.
I guess that most of those who end up reading this Blog are pretty aware of what OSGeo is. Beyond the task of providing a coding infrastructure, QAing project governance and organizing the FOSS4G conferences OSGeo also supports free and open access to geospatial data. This is where OSGeo should and can hook into INSPIRE. OSGeo's spatial IT know-how can tie into INSPIRE in many different ways. Jo Walsh registered OSGeo as an SDIC (Spatial Data Interest Community) in the INSPIRE process, so "we" have a voice there. But afaik no one is talking (except for the odd complaint on Twitter or standards ML that INSPIRE will never work or is all wrong). This may be one of the core issues with INSPIRE. It is broadly recognized as a legal framework, but it is not seen as a process that is open for participation. It has started as an idea at the end of the last millennium and has grown in many different ways. One is the regular standards based, organized, legally binding sometimes sore process of defining specifications and guidelines. Some of this process and their results have been criticized heavily by "us" (that is the agile, sleek, geek "us"). Some LMOs (the Legally Mandated Organizations in INSPIRE, for example the NMCAs) have bent and obstructed INSPIRE until they succeeded in removing some of the explicit openness that was core to INSPIRE since its inception. That is when the GeoRM layer invaded the architecture diagrams, prominently "protecting" all within. We might get a taste of this during the Mash-Up workshop when we try to access some of the data and map services that are made available through the INSPIRE framework. Even if the only outcome of our Open Source Mash-Up event is that the RM crap prevented anything from getting done, it would still be a good result because it gives us a chance to show whats wrong and not only talk about it.
Remember: INSPIRE is neither a physical thing nor a person nor a single organization. It is but an idea and ideas are worth nothing until they are realized. If policy, GeoRM, crappy service quality or technological excesses prevent INSPIRE from taking off then we will have to remove or steer around GeoRM, improve the service quality and propose alternative technology. I say "we" because I believe that it will involve all parties including NMCAs, JRC, OSGeo, OGC (just to name a few) but also the "broad public".
Yes, INSPIRE also foresees interaction with the "broad public". What is the broad public? Some understand it as a Mass Market as it is addressed by the GoogleBingYahoos of this world. Others believe in more collaborative and inclusive governing by the people themselves and call the broad public "European citizens". Think e-Government not as online forms but as collaborating on governing. There are a few hundred million people around and I guess there should be one or two who are also spatially aware and potentially even technologically savvy enough to get something done. But how to identify and then interact with them?
In the ideal case developers and users will meet in a workshop room and collaborate on Mash-Ups. What could that be? I am pretty sure that a few OpenLayers based applications will pop up and maybe a prototype for the biodiversity folks. We might learn that OpenLayers and GDAL/OGR will need to learn GML 3.2.1 just as deegree has. Maybe we just get a better understanding of what INSPIRE is and what it is not.
So lets actually mess up INSPIRE a bit. Interested? Then go register at the INSPIRE Forum and find out what is already going on. Support in action.
If you have questions, post them here, the OSGeo Discuss mailing list, the INSPIRE forum or hassle me directly. Unfortunately I wont be at the conference myself (because they rejected my submission with the title "How INSPIRE failed on metadata"...
. But Paul will be there and Andrea and several other well-known binaries – I mean: folks. And I promise that it will be a productive event - no matter what comes out of it. It will surely be more than what we have achieved so far. Have fun.
Udpate
Read about the first results of the workshop / mash-up in the INSPIRE forum.
