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This is the starting point of GAD' SDI. We offer here an open window to know our rich territory.

Here you can easily access basic cartography as well as thematic spacial information. You can dinamically combine this information to fit your needs.

What is an SDI

An SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure) is a technological environment which includes the rules that facilitate the availability and access to spatial data.

An SDI provides spatial data to discover and evaluate them by users and suppliers at all levels: goverments, business, non-profit institutions, educational institutions and anyone interested.

An SDI includes geographical data, documentation (metadata), ways to discover, visualize and evaluate data, methods to provide access to geographic information. It should also offer additional services and software.

An SDI should include all the organizational arrangements needed to coordinate and manage it locally, regionally, nationally or internationally.

Standards

Standards guarantees the consistency, compatibility and interoperability needed to make all the resources and services of an SDI avaliable so they can be used, shared and combined. Using known starndards SDI's services are easier to use. This allow us to optimize all avaliable resources.

There are three levels to keep in mind during the standarization process: regulations, standards and recomendations.

Regulations: defined by ISO (Internacional Organization for Standardization) in an international level, CEN (European Comité for Standardization) to Europe and AENOR (Asociación española de Normalización y Certificación) to Spain.

Standards: they are stablished by companies and organizations like OGC ( Open Geospatial Consortium). Some of the OGC specifications are:

• Geography Markup Language (GML) 3.0
• Grid Coverages 1.0
• Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD)
• Web Coverage Service 1.0
• Web Feature Service 1.0
• Web Map Context Documents (WMC) 1.0
• Web Map Service 1.3

Recommendations: In Spain the Consejo Superior Geográfico is the body that approves recommendations. Eurostat is expected to outline recommendations for the statistical agencies of countries of the European Union.The CSG has approved the following recommendations:

• Perfil del Modelo de Nomenclátor de España v1.2
• Perfil del Núcleo Español de Metadatos v1.0

SDI Software

There are many free or commercial sofware solutions in the market to develop applications that fullfill OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standards and can be integrated as clients or services through geo-web portals.

Keep in mind that not all software tha claims to fullfill OGC specifications is certified by OGC. Thouse who have are known as compliant product.

You can review the list of OGC registered software if you wish .

The next list is an example of this kind of software:

• Geoserver
• Mapserver
• Geotools
• GeoNetwork
• Deegree

This software alows you to work with geographical information and other services throught SDI's using web browsers (Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome), also knows as thin clients.

Another option are fat clients. They are applications that use all the OGC services: searching, quering, visualization and data analisys, etcetera...

Some of the fat clients are:

• Kosmo
• Jump
• uDig