Dutch GIS software developer IDgis delivered on time INSPIRE View Service and Download Service for the Central Data and Services environment of the joint Dutch Provinces. IDgis used the deegree3 service engine of the German GIS company lat/lon. The View Service meets the Quality of Services requirements with flying colors. The INSPIRE Download Service meets the current INSPIRE requirements.
Excellent performance
The performance of the View Service (WMS) is excellent. If 20 users simultaneously address the service, the response time is less than a second. This meets amply the INSPIRE requirement to render a map within 5 seconds for 20 simultaneous users. The stunning performance is realised due to the streaming technology of deegree3 and clever generalisation of geometries by IDgis. That is, surfaces smaller than 30 meter will be rendered only from the zoom level, at which this kind of detail is actually required.
IDgis has implemented extensive monitoring of services to foresee and solve problems in an early stage, which will ensure the expected availability of at least 99%.
Central, expandable environment
The services solution of IDgis consists of one central services environment for all Dutch provinces (see figure 1). Every night the Harvester checks for new data by consulting the meta data on the Provincial Geo Register (joint meta data register of all provinces) and starts downloading from the WFS service of each province concerned, if necessary. The Validator checks if the data are according the requirements. If so the Loader stores the data in the data base. Finally the data will be served through the INSPIRE View Service (WMS) and Download Service (WFS). IDgis developed a pre-load validation tool to give the provinces the opportunity to validate their data in advance. At he moment the services offer data sets according to the theme "Protected Sites" as defined in Annex I of the INSPIRE Directive. The scalability of the solution in combination with the high performance makes the services suitable for expansion. Therefore the provinces are eager to use the central environment for many other datasets.
You may find the URL to the services on:
http://www.inspire-provincies.nl/en
deegree 3 perfect match
The central environment has been developed in good cooperation between the joint Dutch provinces, IDgis and German lat/lon (deegree 3). lat/lon was also invited to execute development tests. Due to its advanced support for GML application schemas, deegree 3 has proven to be a perfect match for INSPIRE. The fully Open Source solution of IDgis is not only INSPIRE compliant, but can be used in general as central services and data environment for other (governmental) partnerships.
