FOSS4G 2022 general tracks

In force since 2007, the INSPIRE Directive has established a European Spatial Data Infrastructure to support European Union (EU) policies relevant to the environment. The INSPIRE Geoportal (https://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu) constitutes its main component, being the central point of access to all datasets published by EU Member States falling under the scope of the Directive. Using the INSPIRE Geoportal, users can search for, access, visualize and download datasets published by more than 7000 data providers from across Europe.
In line with the open source strategy of the European Commission and the ambition towards a sustainable evolution of the INSPIRE infrastructure based on open source components, since 2021 the INSPIRE Geoportal is has been revamped by using cutting-edge, open source applications and open standards, while redesigning the way in which information and services are offered to users.
The process comprises deep changes in the Geoportal backend, totally renovating the underlying catalogue application: management interface, powerful harvesting engine, set of metadata, data and service linking tests, search engine, automatic metadata translation capabilities, containerization and deployment in a cloud environment. In addition, a new frontend (user interface) is integrated with the mentioned backend using APIs, making both layers more independent in terms of technological stack and update cycles.
The application selected for achieving these goals is GeoNetwork opensource, currently constituting the catalogue choice of around 80% of Member States national geospatial data portals in the EU. Since its inception in 2001, it has been developed with a strong focus on international standards and many new features have been added over the years.
During the last year, the GeoCat staff and the INSPIRE team at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre have closely collaborated in the development of a new powerful and versatile system for delivering the revamped INSPIRE Geoportal, contributing the improvements – to the maximum possible extent – to the core of GeoNetwork to maximize their exploitation by the geospatial community.
More in detail, the system encompasses a high-performance harvesting system based on a microservices, including link validation and reporting functionality. All these pieces have been developed as separate components, which can be scaled independently from other components within a GeoNetwork-based infrastructure. Performance and compliance to the INSPIRE Technical Guidelines formed part of the key requirements of the work. As a result, GeoNetwork capabilities for supporting the INSPIRE Directive will be substantially improved and completed in the toolkit. This, in turn, will also improve the transparency and collaboration between the national authorities and the European level.
At the end of this transitional phase for the INSPIRE Geoportal, foreseen by mid-2022, the project will deliver tangible benefits. Firstly, by providing EU Member States with an up-to-date and transparent toolkit for managing their geospatial metadata, data and services in compliance to the INSPIRE Directive monitoring and reporting obligations. Secondly, by making a direct valuable contribution to the core of GeoNetwork and to the whole open source geospatial community.

The Re3gistry is an open source software for creating, managing and sharing reference codes in a consistent way. Released under the European Union Public License (EUPL) v.1.2 (https://github.com/ec-jrc/re3gistry), it is a key component ensuring interoperability in data infrastructures.
The Re3gistry supports organizations in managing and updating “reference codes” through unique identifiers. Reference codes can be used for example to define sets of permissible values for a data field or to provide a reference or context for the data being exchanged. Examples are enumerations, controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri or simply ‘lists of things’. The Re3gistry provides a means to assign identifiers to such items and their labels, definitions and descriptions in different languages. It provides a user-friendly interface where labels and descriptions for reference codes can be easily browsed by humans and retrieved by machines, including the possibility of downloading them in different formats and exploiting the information using a REST API.
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) started the development of the Re3gistry in 2014 to satisfy the interoperability requirements set by the INSPIRE Directive. In 2020, considering the high reusability of the tool beyond INSPIRE, the JRC released the code as open source. So far, the development of the Re3gistry has been supported by the European Commission under the interoperability actions ARE3NA and ELISE and, more recently, by the National Land Survey of Finland.
In 2021, a second version of the Re3gistry software was released. This version v2.0, complemented by subsequent minor releases, introduced several new features such as a management interface to add and modify the status of items, and the capability to trace the full lifecycle of items following the workflow defined by ISO 19135 standard. The current stable release is v.2.3.0 released in March 2022. The INSPIRE registry (https://inspire.ec.europa.eu/registry) is currently the most popular implementation of the Re3gistry software. It is the central point of access to (currently) more than 7000 reference codes, available in 23 languages and several formats (HTML, ISO 19135 XML, JSON, RDF/XML, Re3gistry XML, CSV), grouped into different centrally managed INSPIRE registers. The content of these registers is based on the INSPIRE Directive, Implementing Rules and Technical Guidelines (as illustration, used to reference INSPIRE themes, code lists and application schemas).
The Re3gistry is currently used by many organizations across European countries (Austria, Finland, France, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, The Netherlands and North Macedonia), different EU-funded projects and private organizations even outside Europe. Since 2021, the Re3gistry v.2.x is included in the OSGeo Live to facilitate discovery and use by the open source geospatial community. In 2022 the software will be also submitted as an OSGeo Community Project.
Summing up, the Re3gistry is more relevant than ever to ensure semantical and organisational interoperability across any kind of systems, including Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs).