Awareness on benefits of spatial data sharing and achieving their interoperability has been developing for many years. Although the INSPIRE Directive, adopted back in 2007, set legislative guidelines for implementation in EU member states, few could have predicted at the time in which direction technological support for specific SDI implementations would develop. In line with the ideas promoted by INSPIRE, the community gathered around open-source technologies quickly began to respond to legislative requirements by implementing various solutions in this domain.

The Talk will demonstrate the possibilities of integrating and utilizing many open-source projects throughout the entire spatial data lifecycle: storing the spatial data in PostGIS database, maintaining it using OpenLayers web GIS client, harmonizing data models through the transformation and harmonization processes, and serving metadata and INSPIRE-compliant datasets and services using GeoNetwork and GeoServer. Given the complexity of the entire process, an integrated solution ENGEON that simplifies the process and is based entirely on open-source technologies will be presented.

The BioAtlas - Biodiversity Atlas of Croatia project included the implementation of a complex information system that enables the storage, editing, viewing, downloading and sharing of field observations of animal and plant species in Croatia.

The system is implemented on the open-source platform Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) which was adapted to Croatian language and legislative. The ALA project is supported by Australian NCRIS and CSIRO and is being actively developed and maintained by the contributors organized under the Living Atlases community initiative. It is a mature open-source project that currently supports more than 20 national biodiversity portals across the world. It’s also the important part of the GBIF ecosystem which promotes and supports free, open and interoperable access to biodiversity data.

The talk will include the experiences and lessons learned during this challenging implementation of the new system in Croatia that was done in 2024 and is now in production. Talk will focus on geospatial features of the platform, its customized WMS server based on GeoServer and a wide range of spatial and statistical analysis functions.

The project has been implemented by Croatian companies VEROX and Protok for the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Green Transition.