Environmental data in serbian spatial data infrastructure - Geoportal of ecology

Abstract

This paper presents development of Geoportal for the Ministry of Environmental Protection of Serbia fully compliant with the standards in the field of geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial data infrastructure (SDI) principles whose aim is to promote interoperability of environmental geographic information systems and their integration in National Spatial Data Infrastructure of Serbia. The system is developed in accordance with GIS standards: ISO 19100 series, which defines the structure of geospatial data and metadata, and OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) standards which standardise the interfaces and communication protocols for different services, in order to achieve shared access and use of spatial data between different systems and different users. The significance of the developed geoportal is that it is the first implementation in this region based on service-oriented architecture and SDI principles. The great resource of legacy data was converted in terms of formats and projections which implied the development of modules for automatic conversion. Large amount of necessary data did not exist, so extensive data acquisition was performed in order to complete data. This involved photogrammetric and remote sensing techniques, digitalisation of paper maps and field data collection.