News Update May 2007

Welcome to the gigateway news update. You are receiving this as an AGI member or having subscribed through the gigateway website.

NIMSA ends but it's business as usual for gigateway

Communities and Local Government - the government department responsible - announced in October 2006 that the National Interest Mapping Agreement, which funds gigateway, would be coming to an end in December 2006.

However, the announcement also stated that the government "will continue until further notice to support the operation of a national
geospatial metadata service".

To that end AGI will continue running the gigateway service until April 2008. We expect that a competitive tendering exercise will take place to determine who will be running the service after this date.

The future of a UK metadata service

AGI is currently running gigateway on a "Care and Maintenance" basis. However we realise that technology is not standing still. We recently commissioned Atkins Limited to carry out an investigation into future technology for a UK geospatial metadata service, with a view to how a long-term replacement for gigateway might operate. The Atkins report covers:

• The context and current technology;
• The need for new technology;
• The INSPIRE Directive and its relevance to a future UK metadata service;
• Proposed logical architecture for the future metadata service;
• The impacts of the future service on node providers;
• Issues that are not yet resolved.

The report may be downloaded from the gigateway website.

INSPIRE Directive published

The INSPIRE directive has now been published in The Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) and is entitled 'Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 March 2007 establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE)'.

The published Directive is available from the following link: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/oj/2007/l_108/l_10820070425en00010014.pdf

For those that do not want to read the whole document, the following snippets illustrate the importance of a continuing metadata discovery service:

"The loss of time and resources in searching for existing
spatial data or establishing whether they may be used for a
particular purpose is a key obstacle to the full exploitation
of the data available. Member States should therefore
provide descriptions of available spatial data sets and
services in the form of metadata."

"Member States shall ensure that metadata are created for the
spatial data sets and services .... and that those metadata are kept
up to date."

"Member States shall establish and operate ...discovery services making it possible to search for spatial data sets and services on the basis of the content of the
corresponding metadata and to display the content of the
metadata"

UK GEMINI developments

A group has been formed to examine UK-GEMINI and determine if any changes are required to the standard. A new draft will be published for public comment once complete. Any changes to the document will be as a result of experience of the document and to comply with INSPIRE implementation rules.

Improving the quality of gigateway

The gigateway team will continue to concentrate on improving metadata quality over the next year. Many data providers will have heard from us over the last few months with an analysis of their current gigateway records. We shall be getting back to some of you again soon, as well as providers we have not yet contacted.. An outline of our quality review is now available on the gigateway website - we shall be publicising examples of good practise here, so keep checking back to pick up tips!

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Gigateway - Association for Geographic Information - 5 St Helen's Place- Bishopsgate London - EC3A 6AU
Tel: 020 7036 0437 / Fax: 020 7036 0301 / info@gigateway.org.uk