BETWEEN INSPIRE AND SEIS INITIATIVES: THE FIRST STEPS TOWARD AN INTEROPERABLE ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION SYSTEM

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1 BETWEEN INSPIRE AND SEIS INITIATIVES: THE FIRST STEPS TOWARD AN INTEROPERABLE ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION SYSTEM C. Maricchiolo 1, M. Munafò 1, G. Turco 2, G. Amadore 2, E. Sarzotti 3, A. Navarretta 3 1 ISPRA, Institute for Environmental Protection and Research claudio.maricchiolo@apat.it, michele.munafo@apat.it 2 Piedmont Region Environment Department giuseppina.turco@regione.piemonte.it, giuseppe.amadore@regione.piemonte.it 3 CSI-Piemonte, Consortium for Information Systems emanuela.sarzotti@csi.it, antonello.navarretta@csi.it Abstract The Italian Environmental Information and Monitoring System (SINA) is a nationwide cooperating network among the main environmental institutions involved in data collection and management processes. Since 2001, the network has involved all the environmental authorities from local to national level to ensure mandatory environmental data provisions and reporting as expected by European directives. Resembling the EEA/EIOnet model, SINAnet is composed of a National Focal Point (NFP) and several Regional Focal Points (RFPs) that collect environmental data about its own spatial envelope and provide them in a shared model. Taking into account Inspire IRs, defining rules and standards to improve spatial information accessibility and sharing, and SEIS, that will demand accurate environmental information quickly and easily available, SINAnet starts to assess the impact of these initiatives over his systems. In particular an experimental activity is implemented by Piedmont Regional Focal Point (PRFP) with Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA), as NFP, to share environmental data and metadata present in each their own Catalogues through interoperable services. This activity aims to evaluate how much effort is required to assure environmental data and metadata sharing, using Inspire compliant national and regional spatial data infrastructures, also assessing the SDI adaptability to the environmental issues. Keywords: environmental information, metadata sharing, Italian National Focal Point 1. THE ITALIAN ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION SYSTEM NETWORK SINA is a nationwide cooperating network among the main institutions having competences on environmental data acquisition and management. The scope of SINA is: to provide policy makers with high quality, relevant and timely data/information on state of environment and trends; to ensure public access to data/information; and to promote integration of environmental concern into policy cycle. SINAnet is based on the following nodes: - the National Module, operated by ISPRA; - the Regional Focal Points (RFP); - the Environmental Protection Agencies (ARPA/APPA); - the Main Reference Institution (e.g. Universities, Research Centres, National Institute of Statistics, River Basin Authorities, etc.). ISPRA (Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale - the Institute for Environmental Protection and Research) is mandated to coordinate the network of the Italian National Environmental Information System (SINAnet - Rete del Sistema Informativo Nazionale Ambientale). Created by Italian Law 133/2008, ISPRA

2 is a public body, under the vigilance of the Ministry of the Environment, Land and Sea. It performs the functions, with the inherent tools, financial and human resources, of three former institutions: APAT (Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services), ICRAM (Central Institute for Applied Marine Research), INFS (National Institute for Wildlife). Acting as the Italian front-end organisation for EEA/EIOnet (i.e. the Italian National Focal Point and the National Reference Centres), ISPRA ensures a seamless connection of SINA and Regional environmental information systems (SIRA) to the European information and observation system; it also promotes interaction with other environment related information systems, organising national coordination of activities related to the EEA strategy. Strategy and implementation projects of SINAnet are based on the SINA Development Programme approved in 2001 by the Permanent Conference among State, Regions and Autonomous Provinces, where objectives, architecture, main players and start-up funding were established. An update of the SINA Development Plan is underway, taking into account inter alia new EU Directives, Communications, Strategies and research programmes. The objective is to make SINAnet the reference institutional environmental network, bringing together relevant partners, infrastructure, contents, products and services. The architecture of SINAnet described in the SINA Development Plan is based on the decentralisation of the environmental information system among different nodes. This design assumption was necessary considering the administrative structure of the Country, where 21 Regions and Autonomous Provinces have their own responsibility in most of the environmental related decision-making. At the national level, ISPRA is responsible for collecting, elaborating, managing, evaluating and disseminating environmental data in cooperation with the Italian regional environmental institutions participating in SINA. The Regional Focal Points are the main data sources at the regional level and are in charge of collecting, documenting and making available environmental data through the SINA network. Most data and information come from monitoring networks and in-situ measurements managed by the EPAs network. SINAnet architecture is based on a national standard defined in The architecture (Figure 1) is based on a shared and cooperative system where RFPs, through the standard shared module (Common Module CM), provide access to environmental data from heterogeneous regional systems. Figure 1: SINAnet architecture

3 2. THE PIEDMONT REGIONAL FOCAL POINT The Piedmont Regional Focal Point represents the local connection point of the SINAnet. It is coordinated by Piedmont Region Environment Department and its organization involves other several departments of Regional Authority (Agriculture, Land Planning, Forestry Management, Soil Protection, Protected Sites, Innovation Technology and Research), Regional Environment Protection Agency (ARPA), with CSI-Piemonte (Consortium for Information Systems) technical support (Brizzolara et al, 2007). The objectives of Piedmont RFP are to implement an interoperable system to share environmental information, both geographical and not, among the different regional public bodies and with SINA, according to SEIS and INSPIRE initiatives; to integrate environmental information provided by Regional Environmental Information System (SIRA) with other spatial information made available by other regional sectors; to provide web tools for every kind of stakeholders from private organizations to citizens, containing the collected information. The main web tools realized are the Environmental Information Catalogue and Environmental Web GIS available on the web site (Turco et al, 2007). In accordance to the law, the environmental information collected by Piedmont Regional Focal Point are to be shared with the higher administrative levels, as the Ministry of Environment and the ISPRA. Thus through the National Focal Point, the regional environmental information reaches European level. To achieve this objective it is necessary to implement an interoperable system that assure data and metadata sharing according to the environmental directives requirements and on the other end to the Inspire directive implementing rules. 3. THE MAIN OBLIGATIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL DIRECTIVES The 2003/4/CE Directive defines as environmental information any written, visual, aural, electronic or other material form on: the state of the elements of the environment; factors, measures and activities affecting or likely to affect the environment or designed to protect it; reports on the implementation of environmental legislation; etc. Member States shall ensure that the right of access to environmental information can be effectively exercised also through registers or lists of the environmental information held by public authorities or information points, with clear indications of where such information can be found. The Italian State brought into force a law (D.Lgs. 195/2005) to comply with this Directive and many catalogues of environmental information have been realized by national and regional authorities. On the other hand, different directives, about several environmental themes, air, water, waste, etc, request periodical reporting activities by Member States to the European Environment Agency. SINAnet shared architecture has been implemented and tested in some pilot cases; however, the design is not completed yet. Nowadays, most of data are transmitted electronically, although several electronic data flows are not standardized and are collected by or in non-structured format. In the last few years, progresses have been made mostly in the air monitoring and water information areas, in the frame of the following projects: - Ozoneweb / Near-real-time Air Quality, to monitoring tropospheric ozone concentration as a pilot project for new type of decentralized data information systems;

4 - the Italian national node of WISE, in the frame of WFD implementation, being built as the new generation dataflow system, integrating diverse reporting obligations pertaining to water (quality, quantity, pressure, responses ). The EEA project Ozoneweb is the main initiative addressing near real time environmental data collection in Italy. Its extension, the project Near Real Time Air Quality (NRT-AQ), is also being developed to assure a national coverage of all air quality components (not only O3 and PM10) and to implement a common infrastructure to share monitoring data between ISPRA and RFPs. 4. THE ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION CATALOGUE OF ITALIAN NFP A large part of SINA dataset has metadata managed directly from the main data sources, the RFPs, who usually have regional catalogues of metadata and replicate a subset of information relevant at national level on FONTI, the SINAnet catalogue developed from EEA Catalogue of Data Sources (Jensen, 1998). Based on open source software, FONTI contains geographic data sets, environmental monitoring data sets, documents, tools, projects, and people; the GEMET (GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus) is adopted for classification and indexing (key words). The national catalogue is available with different access policy and to public through the SINAnet portal ( as well as to RFPs and main public organizations through the private area. 5. THE ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION CATALOGUE OF PIEDMONT RFP The Environmental Information Catalogue of Piedmont Regional Focal Point is a shared system between the competent authorities on the regional territory. The Catalogue publishes for citizens environmental information provided by Regional and Provincial Administrations and Regional Environment Agency, through an unique web interface. At the same time it allows the SIRA partners to fill in their metadata information with a back-end web application. The Environmental Catalogue is integrated with the regional SDI (SITAD Territorial and Environmental Shared Information System), sharing with it metadata model, data base and interoperable services Inspire compliant (Turco et al, 2007). The Catalogue is a JAVA web application using an authentication system that assures security and access profile. A web mapping tool is also provided supporting WMS protocol. This Catalogue system is the reference frame for environmental data and metadata flows from regional towards national and European levels. 6. EXPERIMENTAL ACTIVITY TOWARDS INTEROPERABLE CATALOGUES The SINAnet aims to collect and share environmental information between the Regional Focal Points to rebuild a national perspective of thematic data and metadata. A specific workgroup on catalogue systems analysed the possible solutions, defining network architecture to allows the SINAnet partners to share an unique Catalogue at national level. Two solutions were identified, one based on a distributed database and another based on a centralized database (Simeone et al, 2008). The second one is the adopted solution, at the moment. This solution requires each peripheral node to expose web services, for allowing national catalogue to reach local metadata information. Therefore Piedmont Regional Focal Point developed a web service to provide, via XML with SOAP, metadata about webgis applications and geographical data.

5 The web service is described by a WSDL available at URL The first step, FindbyPatternISPRA method, returns the identification number and title list of the metadata exposed by RFP, that is a pre-defined subset filtered from the regional Catalogue data base. The second step, CreaXML method, implemented by regional SDI SITAD, exports single-metadata information in an XML format compliant with the structure supplied by CNIPA (Public Administration National Informatics Centre). The Italian law about Digital Administration Code (D. Lgs. 82/2005, art. 59) institutes inside CNIPA a Territorial Data Committee, to establish technical rules for exchanging geographical data and metadata between Italian central and local public administrations, taking into account the Inspire Implementing Rules development. One of the first Committee s outputs, although not yet definitively approved, is the XML structure to exchange metadata, according to ISO and ISO standards. The SINAnet Catalogue invokes daily PRFP web service and fills in the centralized database. Metadata models adopted by national and regional catalogues are a bit different, although both refer to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and to the ISO19115 standard for the geographic information. 7. RESULTS Though this experimental activity broadly reaches good results, some metadata information doesn t match correctly the corresponding destination in the final data store for the following reasons. Firstly, the Environment Catalogues can manage not only spatial data sets and services but all the environment information types established by the 2003/4/CE Directive, e.g. alphanumeric data base, documents (reports on the state of the environment, administrative documents, legislation, plans, programmes, etc.), and all the information services available on the web (e.g. thematic webgis or web mapping applications). These kinds of information are out of Inspire scope, then the Implementing Rules don t formalize their exchange encoding standards. As a result, for example, the resource type metadata element couldn t be correctly filled or the URL information to retrieve a web mapping application, mandatory both in the source and in the destination catalogue, can t managed, being an optional information in the XML encoding. Secondly, the ISO topic categories, specified by Commission Regulation (EC) n. 1205/2008 implementing Inspire metadata, don t match the broadly spread taxonomies in environmental field, generally based on the Pressure-State-Response model (OECD), or DPSIR (Drivers, Pressures, State, Impact, Responses) performed by EEA. In this experimental activity, it is difficult to establish a correct match between the regional and national catalogue categories going through the ISO topic categories. For example the IPPC permitted installations spatial data set is catalogued in the PRFP as Response Protection, prevention, environmental permissions and certifications. In the ISO it could match to the Environment or Structure topic categories. In the destination ISPRA Catalogue the correct theme is Interthematic aspects. 8. OPEN ISSUES AND PERSPECTIVES

6 The described experimental activity is one of the first interoperability experiences about metadata in the Italian national environment information system network. However it represents only a first step toward a completely interoperable environmental information system, that should involve all the thematic data flows from local to national and European levels, as required by the European legislation. Environmental data have often a non-spatial or non-numerical nature and they have to be accurate, updated and made quickly and easily available. Therefore it should be desirable that the SEIS initiative will be ensure these issues, as well as define the appropriate standard for the environmental information interoperability, taking into account the Inspire implementation experience. About the future developments improving SINAnet and PRFP interoperable catalogues, they will be focused on: - Inspire compliance (CSW standard adoption); - Italian public interoperable system (supplied by CNIPA) implementation; - multilingual aspects management. REFERENCES Brizzolara, L., Turco, G., Sarzotti, E. and L. Zamponi (2007). Punto Focale Regionale del SIRA: obiettivi, soluzioni organizzative e tecniche, Proceedings 11th ASITA National Conference, November , Turin, Italy, pp Jensen, S. and S. Bjarnason (1998). Catalogue of Data Sources - Annual topic update 1998, Topic report No 5/1999, EEA - European Topic Centre on Catalogue of Data Sources. Simeone, M.G. and A. Troccoli (2008). Il Catalogo dell informazione ambientale della rete SINA, Reports 79/2008, APAT. Turco, G., Garretti, L., Navarretta, A., Sarzotti, E. and E. Bonansea (2007). Armonizzazione dei metadati tra la componente ambientale e quella geografica, Proceedings 11th ASITA National Conference, November , Turin, Italy, pp Turco, G., Sarzotti, E., Zamponi, L. and E. Bonansea (2007). PFR Piemonte Strumenti per la condivisione delle informazioni tra gli enti della PA, Proceedings 11th ASITA National Conference, November , Turin, Italy, pp