Monthly Archive for May, 2006

Two years ago the first version of geoland.at, the geodata network between all 9 Austrian Federal states, was presented.

In Austria the National Mapping Agency is responsible for collecting and maintaining basic geodata such as the official topographic map or the digital cadastre. Within the administration (between NMA and ministries, Federal states, governmental agencies, etc.) this state collected data is going to be sold and licensed. Public funds are making their way from the left state-pocket to the right state-pocket. Of course private companies can buy and license this state collected data as well. By 1st January 2006 a new geodata licensing model became effective. It was a huge step in terms of easing access to and understanding of geodata licensing in Austria. Geodata became affordable even for smaller companies without huge data budgets. Some details still need to be discussed, like multi-user licensing questions or geodata licensing for large umbrella companies. What is still missing, but as far as I know our they are working on it, is online access to geodata via OGC webservices. By now you can only access some maps in an online viewer.

However, geoland.at is the effort to make Federal state collected or maintained geodata publicly available. The online viewer gives you access to 9 data different servers. Geoland.at is based on distributed data management in order to keep the data where it’s going to be maintained and updated. Beside technical aspects and semantic data homogenisation (e.g. river doesn’t mean the same type of flowing water in every 9 states), the political motivation behind geoland.at is far more interesting. Basically the most eastern state has no interest to share any geodata with the most western state. Furthermore there isn’t any legal pressure to do so. The 9 Federal states voluntary agreed within the framework of geodata policy and resulting discussions to build this platform and create thereby a counterpart to the National Mapping Agency.

The new addition on geoland.at is a WMS which gives you access to following layers in your preferred GIS client:

• Road network (federal roads and highways)
• Administrative boundaries (municipalities, districts and federal states)
• Rivers
• Natura 2000 zones
• Shaded relief
• City map in Vienna

I had to add http://www.geoland.at/geolandWMS/service.aspx? to my WMS servers in ArcCatalog to make it work.

Since our work highly depends on state collected geodata (and it’s always very time consuming to get access to) I highly appreciate the recent development of providing geodata through OGC webservices. It allows us to bypass the data delivery process by simply adding a WMS to our maps.

Of course every single Federal state still operates its own online geographic information system, where at least metadata searches through most Federal data sets are possible.

There are probably more advanced GDI’s available in various other countries, but having the political background in mind, geoland.at means a major step towards an Austrian GDI.