Geospatial community gathered to the INSPIRE Conference 2018 in Antwerp last week, and the event was once again fabulous! I think we had the same impression last year, but what can you say when a conference gives you those good feelings every time?
This year we tried new things, and learned new ideas from excellent technical and plenary sessions & workshops. We also had presentations at the conference, and they can be all found from Slideshare! Check Joona’s, Jaana’s and Fabio’s presentations right away!
Spatineo Service Quality Awards INSPIRE 2018
Method for automated classification with INSPIRE data and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery: case remote crop monitoring
How to assess and showcase the impact of open environmental information
Spatineo Service Quality Awards INSPIRE 2018
Spatineo Service Quality Awards INSPIRE 2018
Spatineo Service Quality Awards INSPIRE 2018 from Fabio Bittencourt
Method for automated classification with INSPIRE data and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery: case remote crop monitoring
Method for automated classification with INSPIRE data and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery: case remote crop monitoring from Joona Laine
How to assess and showcase the impact of open environmental information
How to assess and showcase the impact of open environmental information from Jaana Mäkelä
The Availability Certificate
As some of you might have noted, we invited all attendees of the conference to our booth to receive a certificate for their services’ availability. Theme of the conference this year was “Make it work together”, and we had this thought of creating trust among all stakeholders by providing a statement of success: The Availability Certificate.
As you may know, we monitor approximately 90 000 spatial web services around globe. This database has vast amounts of information that could be used to promote the success of different organisations. And this is how the idea about the Availability Certificate was born. We wondered what should be the metric to be certified, and as availability is the most consequential indicator, it was chosen for this certificate.
The availability check for the certificate is based on the monitoring of spatial web services performed by Spatineo. The monitoring consists of Spatineo querying each service once every 5 minutes to determine whether that service is operating correctly. Monitoring agent targets a specific layer or feature type of a service, and the selection of which depends on the service type as well as the configuration of the particular service. Only services that were monitored for the entire period of the certificate are included in the score. Individual availability scores of the included services are listed. The score in the certificate is then the availability average of all included services.
Community that supports all members
INSPIRE Conference brings out the best in people, as ideas and best practices are shared among colleagues in a good spirit. This displays that the geospatial community is definitely united in the goal of making spatial data more reliable and usable to everyone. No one can reach this goal by themselves, but as a community we can progress towards that with haste.
We are proud to be part of such a community, and we would also like to thank our partners for making this year’s INSPIRE even better for us. Epsilon Italia and Wetransform, who we shared a stand with, were both great synergising help to us. And a special shoutout to Wetransform for hosting the morning run through the Zoo! Our colleagues Sampo and Fabio participated to that social event, and both of them said it was well organised and such a highly enjoyable even!
As 2019 there will not be an INSPIRE Conference as we know, the community should take this as an opportunity and create events in order to keep up the good spirit of INSPIRE going. Thorsten Reitz from Wetransform had a similar thought. And perhaps we could plan to have a Nordic INSPIRATION 2019 Event here in Helsinki? If you think this is a good idea, please leave us a comment on what kind of event you would like to see next year within our geospatial community ?
