Giovanni L’Abate

When: Day 2, 15th November, Session 8: DMP Technical Services #Part 1, 10:30 - 11:30

Soil Research Data Policies, Data availability and Access, and the Interoperability challenge for CREA Soil Open Data, Italy

Abstract. Standards to describe soil properties have been strongly improved in the last years, with several ISO specifications and international thesauri available for specific applications. The European directive on “Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE)” has brought together most of the existing standards into a well defined model and other world wide initiatives are aimed to improve the interoperability challenge. Semantic interoperability would facilitate the building of data services that reuse and combine data from different sources. An European specific database right law, the Database Directive (1996), protects the producer of a database, who has invested the necessary effort to constitute the database. According to the strategy of CREA about the dissemination of the research products (November 6, 2013) collections are public shared according to Release license (IODL v2.0) and the principle of Open Data. Open Data are published on the Web in an open format, suitable for use regardless of the necessary tools for their subsequent treatment. Soil data managed by the Agrobiology and Pedology Research centre of CREA might be classified into four main categories: Soil Maps, Soil Bodies, Soil Profiles, and Soil Samples. In reference to Metadata compliance, an INSPIRE compliant metadata profile for soil geographic data-sets and data-set series was obtained trough The INSPIRE portal that offers a Metadata Editor to compile metadata files as XML files. All the soil maps produced by CREA in the last decades have been published online and both metadata and maps can be accessed and searched at soilmaps.it. Data and Service Sharing and Interoperability conforms to open geospatial consortium and ISO standards WFS, WMS, and WCS.