So this year I gave my low level introductory workshop on INSPIRE and people went crazy about SOAP and that all of INSPIRE has to be WSDL-ed to be compliant. But that is simply not true! SOAP is just yet another technology that can be used to fail. But you don't have to. The audience did not want to believe me. I had to show proof. Can you believe it?
taken from an ESRI presentation given in Maribor
More specifically, last month at GSDI first hand experiences came in and told a story of failing interoperability wrt meta data. The BKG (that is ~ the German Mapping Agency) gave a status report on the GDI-DE (pdf, page^ 21/26) (German Spatial Data Infrastructure) and they recommend to stick to files on a file system and maybe use a flat database but to not spend more money and resources on acquiring software that does not interoperate. Well done! It needs some cojones to admit after three years into investigation and testing that we come up with pretty much nothing.
But hold on, not a result in this case is a good result because in the long run we will build something from those flat files and databases that will actually work. We can index it and make it searchable and update it using RSS and so on. Sounds like a treat. Maybe INSPIRE does have a chance after all, just give it a little REST.
Another little detail finally also got fixed: The "Service Bus" in now replaced by "Internet" (in the German context that is basically the technology of the "Web").
The Service Bus in reality is just the Internet
This is good because it relieves me of asking all presenters of INSPIRE what on earth a "Service Bus" is supposed to be. So we are more or less back to where we started. We have meta data, store it in a file system and make it available through the Web. And if we feel fancy we use GeoNetwork to give people a nice interface.
Happy metadating.
