Did you know that we provide a free tool for anyone to use, to see spatial web service availability all around Europe? That tool is called Spatineo Service Map. Service Map is an optimized tool for checking your country’s service availability in mere seconds. Being easy-to-use and free are also some benefits Spatineo Service Map offers, so why not to take advantage of it?
Using Spatineo Service Map to your advantage
We now see quite a wide adoption of the spatial web services provided by the public sector. Achieving widespread use requires not only good quality data and services, but also that the existence of these services are communicated and advertised to companies and private citizens. Our Service Map promotes openness, which should increase public curiosity and scrutiny of the current service quality.
The more users know about your high quality services, the more impactful the quality of the service becomes. What do we mean by that? The more users your service has, the more it has potential to save time of all users combined. If one user saves one minute of their time, once your services have reached standards of high quality, think what kind of impact that quality would have on 10,000 or more users.
Once you have opened Spatineo Service Map, you’ll get a overall view of all services we have identified in Europe. At the bottom, you can see the timeline of the number of all known services over time split into the number of high-availability services (99% monthly availabily or more) and the rest of the services. This historic view of the availability data allows you to see Europe-wide and county specific trends in service number. You can also click on a particular month to see the availability statistics for that time on map.
On the right top side of the screen, there is a menu in which you can select which kind of information you see on the map and in the provider list. You have four themes to choose from:
- Percentage of High Availability Services
- Change in High Availability Services over the last three months
- Total Number of Services
- Change in Total Number of Services over the last three months
You can also dig deeper to region specific data. From this view you can see information on region level. In example Finland is divided into 17 regions and we can see how they compare to each other. We have identified spatial web services in all but two regions in Finland. On the right side we list the most prominent data provider organisations located in the selected area. More detailed information for each service can be found in our advanced availability monitoring and usage analytics tool Spatineo Monitor, which is available for 14-day free trial.
How do we collect the data?
Spatineo harvests available spatial web services from service catalogues and search engines to keep its registry up to date. For the purposes of the map, services are broadly defined as any service endpoint that is described by a single service description document of a particular service type. For example, each WMS Capabilities document describes a single service. All services within our catalogue are continuously monitored. This monitoring procedure is compliant with the INSPIRE normalized testing procedure for availability and has provided us with data spanning back to 2012. To construct the map, availability results for each service are continuously tested month-by-month against the 99% availability threshold (not counting pre-announced maintenance windows) consistent with INSPIRE requirements.
Service Availability is vital for SDIs
The vision and goal of the INSPIRE legislation is to simultaneously open more data and increase its use. We at Spatineo believe it is crucial to show that organisations are working hard to fulfil their obligations. This transparency is necessary to inspire the private sector to discover and trust the spatial web services that can enable companies to both innovate and build new businesses that utilise the open spatial data.
For the actual service quality to improve, data providers should look for tools to monitor and analyse the quality of their services, tools such as Spatineo Monitor.
