A project to promote the usability, exploitability and access to geo-referenced data

The main goal of the project is to promote the usability, exploitability and access to geo-referenced data available at the public administration level, through the use of current state-of-the-art technical solutions. This will require the fostering of innovation at the organizational and deployment level through the use of proven state-of-the-art technical solutions. The project in fact does not have to produce pure technological innovation although a level of technical development will be required.

In current geo-referenced information, available and produced at the local and regional level, is characterized by fragmentation of datasets and sources, difficulties in terms of accessibility and lack of harmonisations between datasets. At the same time the growing popularity of geobrowsers such as GoogleEarth, Ms VirtualEarth or Nasa WorldWind highlights once more, the strategic relevance, for both public and private European organizations and institutions, to collect and manage their own data in an harmonious way.

This approach should be promoted in order to unleash the full potential embedded in the data. This could bring not only economical advantages but it could also improve the level of security and ultimately of e-governance of modern societies.

To this extent one of the main issues is to provide effective and interactive access to territorial GI by integrating interactive real-time 3D navigation capabilities with existing (Web Services). However a greater level of accessibility of territorial information is still limited by the reduced adherence to existing standards in terms of web-service for 3D geo-visualisation of landscapes and cities.

This issue is addressed by a number of initiatives the most relevant being the CityGML [12] Open Standard. This is being carried on by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee as part of the ongoing OGC Web Services Phase 4 (OWS-4) and it represents an effort on harmonization with the ISO standard for Building Information Models. The syntactic interoperability of Web Feature Service (WFS) with Geography Mark-up Language GML3, as defined by OGC and ISO, it allows not only the definition of 3D models but it also allows, through the adoption of CityGML, to define the application schema which defines the structure of the GML3 content to describe, for instance, a city.

The adoption of such approach to support both the geometrical appearance of the territory a the representations of its attributes at the urban and infrastructural level could be a key added value to a modern territorial GI infrastructure. The adoption of an open-source infrastructure capable of providing a CityGML-compliant geobrowser represents a key issue to facilitate retrieval and interaction of territorial GI.

Following several simulations in the area of Trentino

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