Adaption of the Creative Commons approach and the roaming concept to spatial data infrastructures (SDI)

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesThe Spatial data infrastructure (SDI) has been developed for nearly 17 years. However, it still fails to support professional and cross-provider seamless usage. In year 2000, after the introduction of the OGC Web Mapping Service Specification, OGC/ISO TC 211 publishes more than 40 drafts or final standards, which provide basic rules for the geospatial implementation industry. Besides these, the release of the INSPIRE law in 2007 is also a major milestone in the development of SDI. While, the coverage of the SDI providers is still very limited due to the national or natural boundaries which make the SDI can not be largely used in some professional areas. Therefore, a legally-protected business environment is necessary. To pursue an effective and innovative operational model, the roaming concept of GSM was mitigated to SDI named Roaming Enabled SDI(r-SDI) (Roland M. Wagner, 2006). In order to make this innovative idea into reality, the first and must step was to find specific issue – Geospatial information licensing which was also an urgent problem to the normal SDI as well as rSDI. In this paper, firstly, a Creative Commons licensing approach was adapt in the Catalogue Service (CSW) which enabled the clients to get the advanced query results according to the license types. The rights management was successfully enhanced. Secondly, a suitable structure for the operation model in rSDI was conducted, moreover, 5 business use cases were proposed to CSW in different specifications sets. The contractship concepts were applied to the metadata level. Finally a demonstration designed on “deegree” – a free SDI software and web service theory was conducted, by which users can query metadata documents by title, product type, service type, license type, even in a roaming environment. Meanwhile, with the comparison between OGC and INSPIRE documents, some limitations of those standards were exposed. The pilot experiment of the demos proved it provided an effective solution to combine the right management and roaming concept demo with present CSW. The logic and concepts are well implemented in this research work