Interoperable Geographic Information for Biosphere Study

Acronym

IGIBS

Duration

7 months, April to October 2011

Website

http://igibs.blogs.edina.ac.uk/

EDINA Contacts

Chris Higgins

Partnerships

Funders

JISC

Summary

The Interoperable Geographic Information for Biosphere Study (IGIBS) project built on prior work demonstrating how Shibboleth (the open source software that underpins the UK Access Management Federation) could be used to provide an organisational model for Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI).

SDIs at whatever scale – national, regional or global – are built using open geospatial standards primarily from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The most valuable data, eg, the reference data from National Mapping Agencies often implicated in the INSPIRE annexes, is protected. We showed that Shibb can be used to protect OGC web services without requiring any changes to the interfaces.

We wanted the UK public authorities who hold INSPIRE compliant reference data (other valuable data, and open data) to have every means available to them to make that data available to students.

In IGIBS, in the context of the UK Location Programme (UKLP), EDINA worked with the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) and the University of Aberystwyth to address the access control barrier by prototyping a simple tool that allowed users to quickly view their data using interoperability standards in combination with WAG reference data. The use cases we explored emerged from the UNESCO designated Dyfi Biosphere Reserve, particularly in relation to related research and education.

This projectwais constituted in such as way that it fed directly into the UKLP and could have long term consequences for how public sector data was made available to the academic sector. By focussing on a Biosphere reserve, we brought additional international perspective.

Project Deliverables

A Best Practice model for using UK academic SDI at the departmental level
A working prototype of the “WMS factory” tool
A simple mapping application
A demonstration of UK access management technology being used to securepublic sector services in combination with academic sector services