Konferenzbeitrag
EEA and Linked Environment Data - A status report
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2011
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Shaker Verlag
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EEA and Linked Environment Data
A status report
Søren Roug1
1. Transforming Reportnet
When the SEIS initiative was launched in 2008 one big question for EEA was how it would affect the Reportnet system. On the surface, with its centralisation, Reportnet seemed to be the antithesis of the SEIS principles. Nevertheless, we started to analyse what would be needed to transform Reportnet into a decentralised SEIS compliant system. It became clear that reporters making deliveries to Reportnet is only part of the pipeline. Beforehand comes a lengthy process of agreeing to what data to collect and what data format to use between countries and the requester. Deciding where to place it is just a tiny part. It doesn’t really matter whether the dataset is stored at the country or at EEA. What matters is that these datasets are made to order, i.e. the idea of multiple use is already compromised. In that respect they are more like intermediate calculations than the end result. But what about all the data the countries have available, but they are not required to deliver to any supra-governmental body? If the countries could somehow publish it with little effort, then EEA could collect that data and not request Reportnet deliveries. The main problem is that there is no useful format to deliver in. INSPIRE has GML and PNG formats. The only equivalents for tabular data are office formats. In our world, where we have to merge data from 30 sources and often combine it with other data, office formats such as CSV and Excel entail lots of manual labour. If the countries start to post data in comma separated values (CSV) and Excel formats for data that would in earlier times be Reportnet deliveries, then SEIS wouldn’t be progress! On a parallel track we also worked on how to merge the current Reportnet deliveries and require less manual labour to do it. We settled on converting XML to RDF because RDF can hold any format.