• Introduction
• Technical analysis
• Issues and recommendations
• European SIF

Platform independence

Summary

“The infrastructure should be designed to be able to outlive any particular technology. Therefore, the specifications should be implementable in different technology platforms.”

Classification

Category	Data harmonisation and semantic interoperability
Identifier	ISSUE-DI-006
Type of recommended activity	Further investigation about the subject Active collaboration between initiatives
Organisations addressed	INSPIRE: Consolidation Team, IOC Task Force, Drafting Team Network Services, Drafting Team Data Specifications GEOSS GMES: GMES Bureau, GMES Committee (foreseen under COM(2009)223), ESA

Additional information

Context	Potential problems due to technological decisions are already obvious and are expected to cause additional problems in technology evolution: Currently the three initiatives are based on a service-oriented architecture (see technology watch report on Architecture). However, this may not be true for all users of the data from the initiatives and it should be analysed, if data offerings from the initiatives are ready for usage in other architectures, too. Examples could be SEIS or the UK e-government framework, which seem to be considering an architecture based on semantic web technologies. INSPIRE currently foresees GML as the default encoding for the Annex I data, but it explicitly supports the specification of other encoding schemas for appropriate purposes (could be encodings like KML, Shape, GeoJSON, GeoRSS, RDF, etc.)
Rationale	See Context
Dependencies	REC-DI-001 Common Foundation ISSUE-DI-005 Strategy for evolution All tecnology driven recommendations and issues, especially in 'Architecture', Catalogue and Metadata' As mentioned above, this recommendation/issue is directly linked to REC-DI-001 and ISSUE-DI-005. In addition, it is also directly related to the GIGAS topics "Data access" and "Architecture". See, for example, ISSUE-ARC-004.
Further background information	Technology Watch Report - Data Interoperability [PDF] Comparative analysis report (version 2) [PDF] Comparative Analysis Report (version 2) - Annex Recommendations [PDF]
Main discussion points	See above
Roadmap	To be defined