HUMBOLDT Scenario: Protected Areas - Harmonisation capabilities for a future ESDI
The HUMBOLDT project, started in October 2006 and supported by the European Community with the aim of bringing together a variety of scientific, technical, economic and policy driven points of view to reach the goal of a Framework implementation for harmonisation of data and services in geoinformation domain, under the INSPIRE Directive and in the context of GMES Initiative.
The two-pronged approach of HUMBOLDT comprises a technical side of framework development and an application side of scenario testing and validation, through an iterative refinement of the harmonisation solutions provided within the project. As the outcomes of implemented harmonisational framework grows mature, the application side of the project grows more and more prominent.
Among the HUMBOLDT application Scenarios designed to demonstrate the capabilities of the Framework there is the one covering Protected Areas themes and use cases. Coordinated by GISIG, the Protected Areas Scenario aims to transform geoinformation, managed by park author ities, into a seamless flow that combines multiple information sources from different governance levels (European, national , regional) , and exploits this newly combined information for the purposes of planning, management and tourism promotion.
The scenario defines a number of use cases for which detailed user stories have been developed to address and examine planning and management issues, as well as tourism added value. The scenario develops the harmonisation process via active engagement with various stakeholders at the national and trans-national levels including national authorities and European agencies.
The Protected Areas Scenario Demonstrator Portal has been developed and the first version of one of the foreseen Application Cases is described in the work. To test and create examples of the use of the HUMBOLDT tools a Desktop and Web GIS environment together with a server environment was set up and the resulting tests with two HUMBOLDT Web Processing Services have been documented. All the operations have been done using Opensource tools, from the pre-processing of the data sets to the visualisation of final results.
This harmonisation application capabilities set an important stone in the technical approach at the implementation of the European Spatial Data Infrasctructure following INSPIRE rules and compliances with reduced data management efforts.