Enabling Efficient Discovery of and Access to Spatial Data Services

Spatial data represent valuable information and a basis for decision making processes in society. The number of specialisms that use spatial data for such purposes is increasing. Increasing is also the number of services enabling to search, access, process, analyse or visualise spatial data. Standardisation activities of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) support standardised sharing of services through the Web. However, many services declared as OGC compliant do not respond or they are not available. The paper introduces an innovative solution for efficient discovery of and access to spatial data services compliant with OGC specifications. The research was performed in the context of the EnviroGRIDS geoportal. Several thousands of harvested services were quality checked and the summary of the testing including the identified problems are presented