Conference Paper

Open data and information provided by the public sector constitute a significant opportunity for transparency, accountability, better governance, and citizen participation. Reuse of open data can also serve as an instrument for growth, leading to innovation through research, better products and services, new jobs and economic advancement. Geospatial data account for an estimated 80% of public sector information and are the most significant category of open data due to their high production, procurement and update costs, as well as their relevance in multiple domains. Despite their importance, they are increasingly difficult to reuse especially in a cross-boundary multilingual context. The vast majority of open data catalogues in the EU have limited support for geospatial information with insufficient capabilities in publishing methodologies and tools, limited technical foundations to support value added services, and simplistic non-scalable support for geospatial data visualization.

PublicaMundi develops the required methodologies, technologies and software components to leverage geospatial data as first-class citizens in open data catalogues, and deliver reusable software components and tools enabling the development of scalable, responsive, and multimodal value added applications from open geospatial data. For this purpose PublicaMundi extends CKAN open data catalogue through integration with the OSGeo stack, to fully support the publishing, curation and management lifecycle of geospatial data. Software components providing reusable, scalable, and cost-efficient processing and analysis services for open geospatial data are being developed, leveraging both vector and high-volume raster data. In addition, tools to interlink open data with other data, and offer them in a multilingual and cross-boundary context are also being developed. Scalable technologies and services to create and reuse demand-aware, multimodal web maps from open geospatial data are planned for the near future.