Geoportal Rhineland Palatinate SDI

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Geoportal - Rhineland Palatinate SDI

Screenshot Geoportal Rhineland Palatinate

Click Geoportal Rhineland Palatinate to open the application.

Summary

The German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate operates a geoportal to manage state wide and privately operated OGC standardized geospatial data services.

Problem Description

The state of Rhineland Palatinate operates a growing number of spatial data services with software from several vendors and needs to provide access to a broad range of users from the general public to specific secure environments. Additional spatial data related to the region is maintained through services operated by the state's municiplities, the German state and private data providers. Access to some data sources has to be secured, controlled and logged on a user, group and functional level.

The need for domain specific web based applications is growing quickly requiring comprehensive tracking and monitoring of services.

Requirements

From the problem definition the following (shortened) requirements for the implementation of the geoportal were identified. The full list of requirements is available through the Ministry of the Interior.

  • Manage any number of OGC WMS and WFS services running on an arbitrary number of different vendor software
  • Centralized spatial web service repository
  • Service metadata monitoring and custodian notification
  • Notification of Web application operator in case of changes of service metadata
  • Service availability monitor, notification of custodian / publisher / operator
  • Secure access to services that contain privacy related or restrictively licensed data thru Owsproxy and Http_auth
  • Transparent user management for 9000+ users outside of the public administration authentication system and bind to secure OWS access façade
  • Provide access management on a group, user, feature and functionality/application basis
  • Fully mandate capable user management
  • Metadata publishing conforming with INSPIRE

Solution

Most requirements defined by the GeoPortal.rlp analysis document could be addressed by standard out of the box software installations. The core software of the geoportal is the Mapbender framework. Some extensions had to be implemented to the metadata management layer, OWS security proxy and WFS-T service repository. All development that could be implemented as generic modules was added to the Mapbender core allowing it to be reused by other clients.

The core software stack of the geoportal installation is completely based on Open Source software:

  • Mapbender
  • MapServer
  • GeoServer
  • PostgreSQL / PostGIS
  • Typo3
  • MediaWiki

The Geoportal is designed to act as a broker between users and providers of spatial data, information and spatially related services. The portal offers centralized access to spatial data in Rhineland-Palatinate through services organized by metadata in a repository.

The geoportal serves federal state agencies, municipal authorities and private data providers as a platform to maintain their metadata and present their data and services. Direct access to the distributed data sources of each spatial product and service provider ensures that information made available by these institutions on a joint platform is up-to-date. The geoportal does not store any data but only its metadata, service metadata, user identity information and application configuration.

The Portal - User Perspective

Within Geo Data Infrastructure Rhineland-Palatinate, it is upon GeoPortal.rlp to assume the role of the service-oriented agent brokering spatial data between users and providers.

The core functionality of the portal provided to the end user follows the three steps:

  1. Search spatial data
  2. Select result
  3. Show map

The distributed access paradigm keeps the responsibility for the data, service, actuality and authorization with the body in charge (creator, custodian, reseller) guaranteeing a high level of topicality and actuality. The panoply of geodata made available enables users to create their own individual spatial data product and web application. The consistent and comprehensive application of recognized ISO and OGC standards throughout GeoPortal.rlp allow for a smooth exchange of data.

References

Retrieved from "http://www.mapbender.org/Geoportal_Rhineland_Palatinate_SDI"
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