International interoperability standards. In the European Union there is a European Framework for Interoperability, developed by the Community program called Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to Public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens (IDABC) [3]. In addition, in September 2009, Decision No 922/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council was published, related to interoperability solutions for European public administrations, to action plans on e-government on interoperability, and to the Community policy of sharing, reusing and collaborating. On the other hand, interoperability is possible thanks to the existence of open standards. Open standards are publicly available formats or specifications, regardless any individual provider are free of legal or technical clauses that limit their use. Some examples of open standards are the following: - DCAT-AP: The DCAT Application profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP) is a specification based on the Data Catalogue vocabulary (DCAT) for describing public sector datasets in Europe. Its basic use case is to enable cross-data portal search for data sets and make public sector data better searchable across borders and sectors. This can be achieved by the exchange of descriptions of datasets among data portals. - CSW (Catalogue Services for the Web): It is a standard defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium for publishing catalogue records for geospatial data. - INSPIRE: The EU INSPIRE Directive aims to create a Europe-wide infrastructure for public sector spatial information. It specifies formats and discovery services that public authorities must use for publishing spatial data. - REST (Representational State Transfer): It is a standard interface for web applications. It appeared in the year 2000 and it is usually used to develop APIs. For example, the common NGSI language used in FIWARE provides a REST API via HTTP for obtaining data or performing operations on data stored in FIWARE. - Xxxxxx.xxx [4]: It is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet. The schemes have a specific standard vocabulary for different entities. For example, the Place scheme can be used in a city for fixed places such as squares or parks.
International interoperability standards. European Framework for Interoperability has published “European Interoperability Framework for Pan-European e-government Services” (IDABC) for administrations, business and citizens. Furthermore, European Parliament and the Council have published a guide for public administrations in September 2009 with the decision number 922/2009 including action plans for e-government on interoperability by aiming to inform policies of open data sharing, reusing and cooperation. There are also some open standards publicly available. These are standards that are global and regardless any individuals, legal or technical situations that limit their use.
International interoperability standards. The IDABC - European Framework for Interoperability has published “European Interoperability Framework for Pan-European eGovernment Services” for adminis- trations, business and citizens [10]. Furthermore, European Parliament and the Council has published a guide for public administrations in September 2009 with a decision number 922/2009 including action plans for e-government on interoperability by aiming to inform policies of open data sharing, reusing and cooperation [11]. There are also some Open standards publicly available. These are standards that are global and regardless any individuals or free of legal or technical situations that limit their use. So, the following standard formats are used within the Dresden Urban Platform: DCAT-AP: The DCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe is a specification based on the Data Catalogue Vocabulary (DCAT) developed by W3C. This application profile is a specification for metadata records to meet the specific application needs of data portals in Europe while providing semantic interoperability with other applications on the basis of reuse of established controlled vocabularies (e.g. EuroVoc) and mappings to existing metadata vocabularies (e.g. Dublin Core, SDMX, INSPIRE metadata, etc.). GeoDCAT-AP: Extension of DCAT-AP for describing geospatial datasets, dataset series and services. It provides an RDF syntax binding for the union of metadata elements defined in the core profile of ISO 19115:2003 [12] and those defined in the framework of the INSPIRE Directive [13]. Its basic use case is to make spatial datasets, data series and services searchable on general data portals, thereby making geospatial information better searchable across borders and sectors. StatDCAT-AP: Another extension of DCAT-AP that provides specifications and tools that enhance interoperability between descriptions of statistical data sets within the statistical domain and between statistical data and open data portals. CSW: Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW), sometimes seen as Catalogue Service - Web, is a standard for exposing a catalogue of geospatial records in XML on the Internet (over HTTP). The catalogue is made up of records that describe geospatial data (e.g. KML), geospatial services (e.g. WMS), and related resources. REST (Representational State Transfer): Standard interface for web applications approached in 2000, which is generally used to develop APIs. INSPIRE Metadata Schema INSPIRE is a Directive of the European Pa...
