Spatial Data Infrastructure denotes the collection of technologies, policies and institutional arrangements that facilitate the availability of and access to spatial information. During the last few years the development of spatial data infrastructure in Sweden has been influenced by two actions. The first was the European Directive in spatial data infrastructure namely Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE), and the second action was the Swedish parliament's directive early in 2008 on e-Government. In a modern society, spatial data play major roles and have different applications such as information support during disaster prevention and management. These two milestones involving Geodata development have created huge demands and represent great challenges for researchers in the area of spatial data infrastructure. One of these challenges concerned the methodologies involved for testing proposed data specifications from INSPIRE. This paper addresses the above challenge and introduces a framework for testing Geodata. The testing of Geodata includes, the testing of the data specifications for different geographical themes and data structure, the performance testing of Opengeospatial Web Services (OWS) and the usability of Geoportals and services. The proposed methods were evaluated during a pilot test for a regional geoportal in Sweden, and the reported results in this paper show the feasibility and applicability of the methods used. The methods used assisted in the identification of the performance related defects and the bottleneck involved in relation to the response time, stress and load. The methods support the detection of different types of errors that occur during the testing time such as http error, timeout error, and socket error. During the pilot test of a geoportal, it was discovered that the response time was 30 seconds which is 6 times higher than the INSPIRE required time (Maximum 5 second), with 500 virtual users accessing the system and performing a specific task. A usability test was conducted which focused on the users' acceptance and the “think aloud” methods. The usability testing enabled the identification of user-interface related problems and the results were quantified to enable comparisons to be made with current results and those from the new test.

Cadastral systems today are mostly based on digitally represented 2D parcel maps or land registries of 3D components referenced to different documents. With clear limitations to this method, this chapter focuses on creating 3D property information based on existing 3D building models. It starts by investigating shortages of the most prominent semantic building models for BIM and geospatial models (IFC and CityGML, respectively) as well as a pre-developed Unified Building Model (UBM). The result shows that neither one of the three has capabilities for complete 3D cadastre systems. The chapter proposes an extension to the UBM by adding four subtypes to the boundary surfaces above- and under-ground, namely “Building Elements,” “Digging,” “Protecting Area,” and “Real Estate Boundary.” The extended UBM is then implemented in a case study of a hospital building in Sweden and shown to be able to model all surfaces that define 3D cadastral information of buildings. The extended UBM is argued to contribute to e-planning in cities and urban applications as well as to 3D cadastral applications.

Several tasks in urban and architectural design are today undertaken in a geospatial context. Building Information Models (BIM) and geospatial technologies offer 3D data models that provide information about buildings and the surrounding environment. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and CityGML are today the two most prominent semantic models for representation of BIM and geospatial models respectively. CityGML has emerged as a standard for modeling city models while IFC has been developed as a reference model for building objects and sites. Current CAD and geospatial software provide tools that allow the conversion of information from one format to the other. These tools are however fairly limited in their capabilities, often resulting in data and information losses in the transformations. This paper describes a new approach for data integration based on a unified building model (UBM) which encapsulates both the CityGML and IFC models, thus avoiding translations between the models and loss of information. To build the UBM, all classes and related concepts were initially collected from both models, overlapping concepts were merged, new objects were created to ensure the capturing of both indoor and outdoor objects, and finally, spatial relationships between the objects were redefined. Unified Modeling Language (UML) notations were used for representing its objects and relationships between them. There are two use-case scenarios, both set in a hospital: "evacuation" and "allocating spaces for patient wards" were developed to validate and test the proposed UBM data model. Based on these two scenarios, four validation queries were defined in order to validate the appropriateness of the proposed unified building model. It has been validated, through the case scenarios and four queries, that the UBM being developed is able to integrate CityGML data as well as IFC data in an apparently seamless way. Constraints and enrichment functions are used for populating empty database tables and fields. The motivation scenarios also show the needs and benefits of having an integrated approach to the modeling of indoor and outdoor spatial features.

CityGML represents 3D urban objects that can be shared over different applications, whereas, IFC provides a very detailed semantic model for 3D building representations using constructive elements like beams, walls, etc. Attempts have been made to interoperate CityGML and IFC for seeking useful common applications. However, these efforts use a unidirectional method (mostly from IFC to CityGML) for conversion processes. Abidirectional method can lead to development of unified applications in the areas of urban planning, building construction analysis, homeland security, etc.The benefits of these applications clearly appear at the operational level (e.g., cost reduction, unified data-view), and at the strategic level (e.g., crisis management and increasing the analyses capabilities). In this paper, we presentan approach for interoperating CityGML and IFC based on development of aunified building model for converting IFC to CityGML and vice versa. The conversion is a two-steps process in which a model is firstly converted to the unified model and secondly to the target model. Finally, we demonstrate the approach and outcome of each step by a hospital building case that is located in Norrtälje City, north of Stockholm, Sweden.

CityGML represents 3D urban objects that can be shared over different applications, whereas, IFC provides a very detailed semantic model for 3D building representations using constructive elements like beams, walls, etc. Attempts have been made to interoperate CityGML and IFC for seeking useful common applications. However, these efforts use a unidirectional method (mostly from IFC to CityGML) for conversion processes. A bidirectional method can lead to development of unified applications in the areas of urban planning, building construction analysis, homeland security, etc. The benefits of these applications clearly appear at the operational level (e.g., cost reduction, unified data-view), and at the strategic level (e.g., crisis management and increasing the analyses capabilities). In this paper, we present an approach for interoperating CityGML and IFC based on development of a unified building model for converting IFC to CityGML and vice versa. The conversion is a two-steps process in which a model is firstly converted to the unified model and secondly to the target model. Finally, we demonstrate the approach and outcome of each step by a hospital building case that is located in Norrtalje City, north of Stockholm, Sweden.

This paper describes EduServ, the Education Service of EuroSDR - a European spatial data research organisation whose aim is to address the research needs of spatial data provision in Europe. With a current membership coming from seventeen European countries and a strong working relationship with related European organisations, EuroSDR has amassed considerable experience in addressing the extent and nature of this need. In order to facilitate the transfer of outcomes of EuroSDR research activities to the user domain, e.g. to key personnel in geographic information (GI) production organisations and industry, EuroSDR commenced this annual series of elearning courses in 2002. The Internet courses are preceded by a seminar at which participants meet tutors and receive guidelines for following the courses from their own locations. Delivery of the two-week courses requires an acceptable level of Internet connectivity, which exists in most member countries. EuroSDR is aware, however, that should such courses be shared internationally, other forms of communication will need to be addressed, such as satellite broadcasting. This would require effective collaboration with related organisations with experience with this means of communication. EduServ courses are offered in two successive years. During the courses, participants enjoy access to course tutors with a 24-hour response to queries guaranteed. Thereafter, course material for these courses is made available online. EuroSDR continues to work with past course tutors to ensure that this valuable resource is maintained as an effective and sustainable archive. This paper is aimed at sharing EuroSDR's experience in distance education with the wider scientific community with a view to its applicability to a global audience, whereby instead of sharing expertise within the GI community in Europe, European mapping agencies can share their knowledge and experience with the international GI community.

The European project Nature-SDIplus has developed data and metadata specifications for three INSPIRE Annex III themes: Habitat and Biotopes, Bio-geographical regions and Species distributions. These serves as a foundation for the thematic groups developing the corresponding INSPIRE specifications. The aim of this study is to test a data harmonization approach to make Swedish environmental geodata and metadata compliant with these specifications. In the harmonization process, we use offline transformations that are split into one spatial and one non-spatial part, and standardized formats to allow vendor neutrality. Moreover, we extend the compliance tests to the data and metadata specifications by validating against both extensible Markup Language (XML)-schema and Schematron. Finally, we identify harmonization processes that may be costly or have negative impacts on data quality. The harmonized data and metadata are thereafter published as network services compliant with OGC Web Service specifications. The output from our method is data and metadata that are valid to the Nature-SDIplus data specifications and metadata profiles. Although the usage of standardized formats facilitates vendor neutrality, the nonspatial transformation procedures expressed in interoperable languages seem to be insufficient to execute all the mapping rules. Therefore, some of these transformations cannot be executed in a vendor neutral environment without modifications. Furthermore, by splitting the harmonization into two manageable parts, we avoid some limitations about XML schema translations in existing spatial transformation tools. Additional findings are: (1) by extending the validation with Schematron tests, we find non-compliances that have been missed during the XML schema tests; (2) costly processes are identified, which are caused by missing elements and by unstructured information given as comments; and (3) degradation of the positional and thematic accuracy occur during the harmonization.

GeoTest is a project initiated by Future Position X (a GIS cluster organization in Gävle, Sweden), the National Land Survey of Sweden (NLS) and the University of Gävle. The project aims to test Swedish geodata and make sure they comply with the INSPIRE specifications in Annex I–III. The purpose of this paper is to present the development of and experiences from GeoTest in developing the required infrastructure for testing Swedish geodata.

Due to the high demand for geodata in modern society, and anticipated requirements by INSPIRE, the issue of testing a national SDI is very important. An adequate testing environment is required. In this context, two aspects are discussed:

1. Technical requirements for GeoTest.

2. Organizational and coordination aspects.

The technical requirements for GeoTest are to provide an environment to test current specifications in the context of INSPIRE Annex I. The methodology is crucial to govern the testing process. The developed methodology mainly relates to the transformation testing of the themes specified in Annex I–III. The objective of the tests is to ensure that the specifications are balanced in terms of costs and that they contribute to address user needs. At this stage, GeoTest focuses on transformation testing. The aim is to test that the transformations from local schemas to INSPIRE schemas are technically feasible.

The methodology is based on four stages; the main strategy used in this testing was the ETL (extract-transform-load) approach. The testing process started with a preliminary desk study, with the objective to collect basic information about the themes and identify the availability and sources of schemas. The extraction process helped to identify the costly procedures when generating GML data that conform to the source schemas; in this stage we encountered some problems in the extraction process, as the data are loosely coupled to the source schema. The transformation procedures of the GML data from the extraction process to the INSPIRE GML schema performed in three sub-stages, mainly related to schema mapping, matching and transformation.

The testing process was coordinated with NLS, via one contact person per theme. The extraction for the sample data was based on random selection of 5% of the sheet index. The paper presents the results of testing five themes addresses, cadastral parcels, geographical names, hydrography, and transport networks. The result shows that in total, 13 INSPIRE schemas has been investigated. Of these, data may be delivered for 10 schemas.