Horizons Regional Council

Environmental Integrated Data Infrastructure (e-IDI)

Briefly describe the initiative/ project/ service

The e-IDI is a proof of concept project based in New Zealand with the aim to make environmental data more discoverable, shareable and accessible to support the supply and usage of authentic river monitoring product data provided by local and central government agencies using a solution on the web.

There were six PoC participants collaborating on the project, four regional councils and two central government agencies that used different systems to generate environmental data. Consequently, the architectural solution (underpinned with the Linked Data services) was tested with data was updated in near real-time, with new flow measurements being added every 15 minutes using a commercial solution that utilized web and data best practice based in the UK. The solution transformed the council data services from WFS, XML and ESRI geodatabase formats into standardized linked open data services by means of national and international vocabularies producing data that was interoperable.

Why do you think it should win this award?

The project used a number of authoritative standards for data and metadata: Sensor, Observation, Sample and Actuator ontology (SOSA, part of the Semantic Sensor Network); Dublin Core Metadata Initiative; Data Catolog Vocabulary (DCAT); Vocabulary of Interlinked Datasets (VoID); Data Quality Vocabulary and QUDT

The project also used the iStandUK standard for designing URI sets and the OpenPublicData.com prototype to test the linked data services from the commercial solution.

A public report that describes methods, results and lessons learnt are made publically available and contributes to ALGIM’s Local Government Linked data toolkit, made available to all councils within New Zealand and eight other sister groups worldwide (which includes Socitm).

What are the key achievements?

• The proof of concept was successful integrating multiple heterogeneous data resources at a national scale.
• Minimal impact to existing business as usual operations, which makes it sustainable.
• Minimal capability required to use solution.
• Generating an accessible product that is standards compliant.
• The standardised data in the data platform was used to support several independent applications, to support access to the data for different audiences or purposes