Fostering the Vision of Information Sharing in Europe

Abstract

Sharing Information (across borders, domains, organisations, etc.) is one of the strategic goals of the European Commission within Framework Programme 6 and 7. It includes the vision of building the Single European Information Space and is a challenging task for research and industry as well as for policy. ORCHESTRA (Open Architecture for Spatial Data Infrastructure in Risk Management, Integrated Project, FP6) as one of the mainstream projects sharing this vision can be seen as a corner stone for applications, enabling information sharing across boundaries. ORCHESTRA clearly and precisely explains the process of building sustainable architectures and infrastructures (ORCHESTRA Book 2008). Furthermore it enables software architects/engineers to derive their (domain specific) applications applying ORCHESTRA rules. By doing so, they will get – more or less for free – interoperability between information systems and can start sharing information and collaboration across borders or organisations. The results produced by ORCHESTRA, namely the RM-OA, the Reference Model of the ORCHESTRA Architecture (Usländer 2008) is based on standards (e.g. ISO/OGC standards) and was recently accepted by OGC (OpenGeoSpatial Consortium) as a best practices paper within the architectural working group. This means that the integration process of ORCHESTRA’s architectural approaches into OGC standards (and affiliated standardisation bodies) has started. Beside the pure architecture many ORCHESTRA services running on the developed ORCHESTRA infrastructure were implemented. These so-called core or architectural services (OA services) are able to support many applications, not limited to the risk management domain. In order to make this visible and prove the reference model, four pilot applications were developed, each of them forming an ORCHESTRA service network integrating several different and diverse information/data sources. Additionally a federated pilot application was developed, showing with support of semantics and the integration of different information networks as well as the possibility of information sharing across different organisations and system borders.