Bolegweb Platform – Contribution to the Web Communities

The effective access to and reuse of geospatial information (GI) has come to be of critical value in modern knowledge based society. The standardized web services defined by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are frequently used for the implementation of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), to expose geospatial data, metadata and models on the Web. These GI are normally stored in an encoded geospatial layer, which is hidden from search engines. SDI uses a catalogue service for the web as a gateway to GI through the metadata defined by ISO standards, which are structurally diverse to OGC metadata. Therefore, a crosswalk needs to be implemented to bridge the OGC resources discovered on mainstream web with those documented by metadata in an SDI to enrich its information extent. We have to build mechanisms allowing entrepreneurs and developers access the information SDI is providing to build their apps. The paper reports a global wide and user friendly platform of OGC resources available on the web with the main goal to ensure and enhance the use of GI within a multidisciplinary context and to bridge the geospatial web from the end-user perspective, thus to open its borders to more web communities. The platform has been developed in the research project Borderless Geospatial Web (Bolegweb)