ICT technical guidelines

Technical references for services

This section contains the technical references about interfaces, versions, operations, etc. required at server or client levels. Indeed, the details of these technical references are based on previous EU projects (e.g. eENVplus, GeoSmartCity) available at the deliverables public access pages.

Technical references are divided in three main sections:

• client: set of requirements related to client software (desktop or web) directly used by human beings to search/discover, view, access energy-related data
• server: set of requirements related to server components, to be made available at partners’ level
• interface: set of requirements related to standard interfaces and protocols to be considered at client and/or server side levels to guarantee interoperability

The detailed list of technical specifications is available in the separate page ICT technical guidelines.

Metadata catalogue services (CS)

Table 8 - Technical details for metadata catalog services - client

DESCRIPTION

CS clients shall allow users to search the catalogue either through hierarchical browsing, or by expressing queries with a combination of parameters defined by the user through the controls (edit boxes, select boxes, etc.) available in the discovery GUI

CS clients shall enable the user to filter search results by selecting / setting a value for the following features: INSPIRE themes (e.g., Addresses, Administrative Units, etc.) or other topic categories Country Resource type (e.g. dataset, layer, service, series) Service type (e.g. discovery, view, download, invoke, transformation, other) Spatial resolution Original language Access constraint Responsible organization Timestamp Defined timeframe (decade, year, or month, based on “Creation date”, “Temporal extent”, “Publication Date”, “Revision Date”, or all dates) Bounding box (geographical constraint) Geographical name (based on gazetteer)

CS client shall allow users to sort the results by various criteria such as name and date or geographic ranking, which is based on a similarity function between the area of the rectangle of the found items and the geographical constraint.

In the case of discovery of viewable layers, CS client shall allow users to visualise them on a geographic viewer (View Service clients), which enables the user to browse these layers over a background map (pan / zoom) and switch on/off the visibility of the layers.

CS clients shall allow users to add and combine layers to the map (geographic viewer) in the following ways: from a search of the Geoportal’s Catalogue Service from local (cached) resources

CS Client shall perform automatic multi-lingual keyword suggestions in the GUI (concept of interactive discovery and auto-completion) given by the internal vocabulary and code-list, using GEMET and additional thesauri (e.g. eENVplus Thesaurus Framework)

Table 9 - Technical details for metadata catalog services - server

DESCRIPTION

CS server shall be able to return a list of identifiers for corresponding features for a request expressed in an OGC query language (aka “Discovery.GetRecords” in CSW specification).

CS server shall be able to return associated meta information instances of features selected by user, managed by the catalogue and returned by a previous query (getRecordById).

CS server shall provide a mean that allows harvesting resources over the network (Manager.Harvest).

CS server shall provide the ability to push information into the catalogue. This operation receives the meta information to be stored and returns information about the update of the catalogue (Manager.Transaction).

CS server shall accept an area of interest (geographic zone definition) and a time period in input parameters

CS server shall accept the lower limit and the maximum number of results by catalogue

CS server shall check metadata inserted, updated, or harvested.

CS server shall allow search in distributed catalogues.

Table 10 - Technical details for metadata catalog services - interface

DESCRIPTION

Discovery services shall support one of the following interfaces to make their data discoverable: OGC CSW 2.0.2 ISO Application Profile compliant DCAT-AP CKAN API

View services (VS)

Table 11 - Technical details for view services - client

DESCRIPTION

VS client shall allow users to view and browse a map (zoom, pan)

VS client shall allow users to query and select data

VS client shall allow users to access Table of Contents and switch layers on/off

VS client shall allow users to retrieve maps and/or data provided by remote nodes, adding layers as: OGC WMS OGC WFS OGC WCS

VS client shall allow users to add layers to the map in the Table of Content (ToC) in the following ways: from a URL (OWS GetCapabilities) from a search on Catalogue Services from local resources (local file systems or RDBMS)

VS client shall allow users to remove layers from the ToC

VS client shall allow users to change the portrayal of a layer, changing Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD) documents available for the layer itself

VS client shall allow users to add and apply external Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD) documents to layers

VS client shall allow users to remove Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD) documents out from layers

VS client shall allow users to change the opacity of each layer

VS client shall allow users to export and save locally the context of the map in the following graphic formats: PNG GIF JPEG PDF GeoTIFF

VS client shall allow users to export and save locally the context of the map as hyperlink (permalink)