As legislation continues to impose the demand for data interoperability and shared services, the capabilities of GO Publisher are enabling international organisations to achieve compliance. Snowflake Software now welcomes the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, Ordnance Survey and the Geomatics Department of the University National Chen Kung to its User Group.

International community schemas are becoming more abundant and, with the INSPIRE directive getting closer to reality and the ensuing obligations on the Member States, it has never been more important to facilitate the “opening of data” – and many organisations are already ahead of the game.

The European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) is using GO Publisher WFS (Web Feature Server) within the EU Integrated Project ORCHESTRA (Open Architecture and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Risk Management) for research within schema mapping. One of the use cases being considered is to map forest fire records from EU member states into a common European schema, thus allowing interoperable access to data. Taking the standard WFS interface as a starting point, JRC is investigating how (semi-)automatic schema mapping can be supported for pan-European spatial data integration & access.

Ordnance Survey’s GeoData Management Group is also using GO Publisher on a variety of research projects requiring the publication of geographic data in XML and GML schemas. The decision to use GO Publisher was based on its ease of use combined with its rich feature set.

GO Publisher Desktop is being used for internal development and research projects such as creating 3D GML data, designing data for web services, and investigating GML schemas for delivering data updates. GO Publisher WFS is then utilized for testing data delivery via web services. GO Publisher helps to streamline internal data management processes and allows Ordnance Survey to be flexible in its approach to the publication of data.

"GO Publisher is an enabling technology, removing technical barriers to publication of data via web services, making data publication in GML much simpler,” explains Jonathan Makin, Head of Corporate Geospatial Information Management, Ordnance Survey. “Researching this will allow us to focus on developing the data itself, rather than the technology used to deliver it."

It is not only in Europe where schema translation is becoming an issue. In Taiwan, the University National Chen Kung is running an Academic Programme on the Geographic Data Standard of Taiwan. To date the programme has designed 10 standards for geographic data, all of which use GML for data encoding.

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When the University needs to build test data, it uses GO publisher to input predefined XML schema, link to Oracle, set up all the parameters and then output the GML. “When we validate the GML files with XMLSpy, we find that all the GML files are valid to their XML schemas,” explains Chin-Sung Yang of the University, “We were exhilarated by the results and are now testing GO Publisher WFS to serve GML data to given XML Schemas.”

The next step for the University is to design an OGC-wide environment for Taiwan. Since it is very important that the data can be encoded by GML and be compatible to standard XML schemas, they are now also looking to utilise GO Publisher for this project.

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