Best practices for publishing, retrieving, and using spatial data on the web

Data owners are creating an ever richer set of information resources online, and these are being used for more and more applications. Spatial data on the Web is becoming ubiquitous and voluminous with the rapid growth of location-based services, spatial technologies, dynamic location-based data and services published by different organizations. However, the heterogeneity and the peculiarities of spatial data, such as the use of different coordinate reference systems, make it difficult for data users, Web applications, and services to discover, interpret and use the information in the large and distributed system that is the Web. To make spatial data more effectively available, this paper summarizes the work of the joint W3C/OGC Working Group on Spatial Data on the Web that identifies 14 best practices for publishing spatial data on the Web. The paper extends that work by presenting the identified challenges and rationale for selection of the recommended best practices, framed by the set of principles that guided the selection. It describes best practices that are employed to enable publishing, discovery and retrieving (querying) spatial data on the Web, and identifies some areas where a best practice has not yet emerged

Collaborative network for district energy operation and semantic technologies: A case study

The growing interest toward renewable energies and alternative energy sources has led to the development of an increasingly complex district energy landscape with multiple agents and systems. In this new prospect, some frameworks such as USEF [1] or holonic multi-agent systems [2] propose new approaches, where, in the way of a Virtual Organisation Breeding Environment (VOBE) [3], diverse organizations cooperate on a long-term basis to run an energy system. This study focuses on the THERMOSS project, an EU-funded project that investigates the efficient operation of district heating and cooling networks, and demonstrates that such organisation can be integrated into the Collaborative Networks (CNs) paradigm. Additionally, a semantic approach is briefly introduced as a mean to support and improve data transfer and communication between the different entities of THERMOSS as a CN