News
22nd July 2010
HUMBOLDT Open Day:
Data Harmonisation in Action
The HUMBOLDT Consortium invites you to the HUMBOLDT Open Day on September 28th, 2010 in Lisbon, Portugal. There, you will get an insight into the main outcomes and achievements of the project which has now entered its final phase. In co-operation with the VESTA-GIS project and co-located with a NATURESDIPlus Training Conference, the HUMBOLDT Open Day will present to you the feasibility and advantages of Spatial Data Infrastructures based on software tools and processes for data harmonisation. Host for both events is the Instituto Geográfico Português (IGP) from Portugal.
More information can be found here.
21st June 2010
Feedback on Humboldt@INSPIRE 2010: Scenario Evaluation
Your feedback is very important for us in order to reveal different point of views about the Humboldt Framework and its associated scenarios by INSPIRE, GMES and related communities who are not directly involved in the Humboldt project. Therefore, a questionnaire for Humboldt Scenario Evaluation (no login required) has been prepared. We invite all INSPIRE Conference attendants and all members of the Humboldt Community to support us in inventoring benefits and relevance of Humboldt Scenario Applications to specific communities and relating projects/initiatives.
21st June 2010
Humboldt at the INSPIRE Conference 2010
This year's INSPIRE Conference takes place from 22nd to 25th June 2010 in Krakow, Poland. The theme is "INSPIRE as a Framework for Cooperation".
Humboldt will be represented in the workshop "Data Harmonisation in the Humboldt Scenarios and the Humboldt Training Framework" which is scheduled for Tuesday 22nd of June 2010, at 4:00 p.m. The goal of this workshop is to present the Humboldt potentiality in different application contexts ("Scenarios"), as a training session offered to the user communities of the Humboldt data harmonisation tools, as well as for the communities of GMES and INSPIRE. The workshop will also present the Humboldt Training Framework, addressed to the practical use of the project's outcomes, paying special attention to training dealing with data harmonisation experiences in different domains and in real world conditions.
On Thursday 24th of June 2010, at 4:00 p.m. in the session on "New and evolving tools and technologies" the paper "Integrating spatial data integration: An Architecture for Complex Transformation Services" by Thorsten Reitz, Daniel Fitzner (both Fraunhofer IGD, Germany), Marian de Vries (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands) and Ana Belen Antón Gironés (ETRA Research and Development, Spain) will be presented.
Furthermore, the paper "Data Harmonisation Put into Practice by the Humboldt Project", by Astrid Fichtinger, Ulrich Schäffler (both Technische Universität München, Germany), Joachim Rix, Simone Scherer (both Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany) and Moses Gone (Fraunhofer IGD, Germany) will be presented on Friday 25th of June 2010, 12:00 a.m. in the session "Trans-national SDI projects".
Our partner projects eSDI-NET+, NATURESDIPlus, plan4all, GS Soil, VESTA-GIS will also be represented on the INSPIRE conference, either by workshops or paper presentations. For further information on this subject, please visit the INSPIRE Conferece website where you can find the INSPIRE Workshop programme and the INSPIRE Conference programme.
21st June 2010
6th GIScience
Zurich, Switzerland will be the host city of the 6th GIScience conference from September 14th-17th, 2010. Thorsten Reitz (Fraunhofer IGD, Darmstadt, Germany) will present his paper "A Mismatch Description Language for Conceptual Schema Mapping and its Cartographic Representation."
21st June 2010
Humboldt Final Event
In September 2010 the Humboldt project will finalise in a two-day workshop event. The first day will be used for public training workshops on Humboldt Tools and Services as well as Scenario Applications. More detailed information on this event will follow soon on the Humboldt Website and in a separate communication.
21st June 2010
Humboldt Framework for Data Harmonisation
In April 2010 a new version of the Humboldt Workflow Editor has been released and can be downloaded from the Community Website. A high-level overview of the Workflow Design and Construction Service can be found at the respective Wiki page.
In this release, the Workflow Editor allows registering OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) and OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) and composing them into workflows. The workflows can be exported to the Humboldt Workflow Repository Service. Therefore, working with the Workflow Editor currently requires internet connection. Any running WFS or WPS can be registered to the editor via its registration interface, simply by providing the URL.
Please find more information on this (and the other functionalities) in the user manual. The Workflow Repository Service will be accessed by the Humboldt Mediator Service which is the component responsible for the execution of the data harmonisation process. The implementation of this execution-functionality is ongoing and will be available by July 2010.
Furthermore, in May 2010 a new release of the Humboldt Alignment Editor (HALE) has been released. It provides several new features as well as bug fixes. Novelties are, for instance, the Graphical Mapping Representation, the Wizard for Concatenation of Attributes and the possibility to load instance data from a WFS. For more information on this release please visit the HALE News at the Community Website.
Any feedback, error documentation or anything else related to the Workflow Editor, Workflow Repository Service or any other component of the Humboldt framework is highly appreciated. All components as well as full specifications are available for free download on the Community Website, which also provides a forum, wiki and issue tracker.
21st June 2010
Humboldt at AGILE 2010
The 13th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science: "Geospatial Thinking" took place from 10th-14th May 2010 in Guimarães, Portugal.
The Humboldt project was represented by the paper presentation of Eva Klien, Thorsten Reitz, Daniel Fitzner (all Fraunhofer IGD, Germany) and Ulrich Schäffler (Technische Universität München, Germany) on the subject of "Efficient Conceptual Schema Translation for Geographic Vector Data Sets."
21st June 2010
Humboldt at the Digital Earth Summit
The Digital Earth Summit Conference took place from 12th-14th Juni in Nessebar, Bulgaria.
Humboldt was featured in the Plenary Session 4 - Digital Earth in Sustainable Development at Local and Regional Levels. Daniel Kristof (Institute of Geodesy, Cartography and Remote Sensing, Hungary) presented the paper "The Humboldt Project: Developing an Open Source Framework and Tools for Geodata Harmonization" which is a joint effort from Daniel Kristof, Christine Giger (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland), Eva Klien, Thorsten Reitz (both Fraunhofer IGD, Germany) and Santiago Caceres (ETRA Research and Development, Spain).
7th April 2010
Call for Participation
The integration of user requirements from various application areas has been an essential part of the Humboldt development process from the very beginning of the project. User requirements have been identified and integrated. In order to amplify the user involvement the project is launching an official call for participation targeted at developers and potential users of Humboldt tools and services. Please feel free to explore the following areas:
1st March 2010
EC chooses Humboldt project as representative success story
The EC Review in December 2009 was very positive for the project. On this basis the Commission has selected the HUMBODLT project as a success story that will receive special attention in EC journals, events and communications.
9th February 2010
Humboldt Framework for Data Harmonisation
New releases of the Humboldt framework tools and services have been published.
The main novelty is the Workflow Design and Construction Service (WDCS) component. It enables users to register and compose geoprocessing functionality into service chains. These service chains can either be encapsulated as OGC WPS or directly implemented on the platform on which the Humboldt Mediator Service is deployed. Furthermore, it provides the functionality to support automated harmonisation.
Since the first public release of Humboldt tools and services there has been an active interest by developers with various backgrounds. Numerous bug reports, feature requests, and further suggestions and contributions have been conceived. Developers and users with an interest in data harmonisation are invited at any time to further test the design and expandability of the framework. The components as well as full specifications are available for free download on the Community Website, which also provides a forum, wiki and issue tracker.
1st February 2010
Humboldt Training Platform
The Humboldt Training Platform and courses are available for free registration. It embraces different course levels targeted at users with different backgrounds and previous knowledge. Beside an optional entrance test on GIS theory and technical issues there are Level 1 courses on GMES, web services, metadata, concepts and standards as well as on data harmonisation in general. Level 2 courses embrace the Humboldt framework components and data harmonisation in Humboldt.
Please feel free to register, review and test the available courses and the platform itself. Any kind of constructive criticism and suggestions are highly welcome.
9th December 2009
Annual Report 2009
The Humboldt Annual Report 2009 is now available for download. The Annual Report provides an overview on the Humboldt project and reports on its major achievements in the past project year.
Download report (PDF, 4.9 MB)
4th December 2009
A Lightweight Introduction to the Humboldt Framework
The Humboldt Architecture Team gives a lightweight introduction to the Humboldt framework specification version 3. It contains a description of the concepts and components from a high-level point of view and gives pointers to the relevant specification documents of deliverable A5.2-D3. Further, it gives a detailed example of how the Humboldt components are used within one of the Humboldt scenarios (Protected Areas).
Download document (PDF, 473 kB)
16th November 2009
Edge Matching Service Milestone 4
The Edge Matching Service (EMS) Milestone 4 has been released and published in the Humboldt community web site. This service is compliant to OGC Web Processing Service 1.0.0. This is one of the processing components defined within the Humboldt Framework and it aligns edges and points of vector geometries so that they will be gapless.
More information about the EMS scope can be found here.
A packed version of the EMS can be download here.
The user documentation is available on the Humboldt Community Website.
7th October 2009
Experience Reports on AGILE Conference and GSDI11/INSPIRE Conference in June 2009
The Experience Reports of the Humboldt presentations at the AGILE Conference and at the GSDI11/INSPIRE Conference both in June 2009 are now available for download.
Download Experience Report on AGILE Conference (DOC, 115 KB)
Download Experience Report on GSDI11/INSPIRE Conference (PDF, 206 KB)
9th June 2009
GSDI11/INSPIRE Conference 2009 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands
The Humboldt project will be represented in a workshop session at this year's INSPIRE conference at Rotterdam
9th June 2009
AGILE Conference 2009 in Hanover, Germany
The Humboldt project will be represented in a workshop session at this year's AGILE Conference at Hanover
9th June 2009
Annual Report 2008
The Humboldt Annual Report 2008 is now available for download. The Annual Report provides an overview on the Humboldt project and reports its major achievements in 2008.
Download report (PDF, 1.1 MB)
9th June 2009
Open Source Humboldt Software
Going public – Milestone 1: The technical goal of Humboldt is to support SDI enablement by providing the functionalities for covering the data hamonisation process as a whole. The developments are built on current state of the art and standards and it is possible to make use of single functionalities as part of your own infrastructure. The methodological framework of Humboldt is supported by a Harmonisation Toolkit and a Service Integration Framework. All Humboldt developments will be available as Open Source Software, released under the LGPL 3.0 license. The first set of components is now available for free download to get involved as tester or developer: http://community.esdi-humboldt.eu.
28th May 2008
Humboldt Scenario Mid-term call launched – Humboldt partners are encouraged to propose additional scenario development
An essential element of the Humboldt project is the development of scenarios in which the different Humboldt components are applied and tested under realistic conditions. These scenarios are based on applications in different environment-related use cases. The scenarios are both a test bed and a community-driven research environment, which assist in the development and promotion of the project's objectives.
Currently, the following application scenarios are being addressed by the Humboldt partnership. They are organized along the core themes defined for GMES:
- Border Security: Enabling Effective Border Control and Security in Rural Areas
- Urban Planning: European Urban Management Information Systems
- Forest: Saxony & Czech Cross-Border Forest Scenario
- Planning: Management of Protected Areas of Regional Parks
- ERiskA: Environmental Risk
- Water: Water Management
- Ocean: Oil/Contaminants spill crisis impact and management
- Galileo: GALILEO Integration for Atmospheric Data Distribution
The Midterm Scenario Call is a strategic instrument, designed especially to strengthen the scenario work through the co-operation with other existing initiatives in the project partners' environment. Provided funding aims at support collaboration and the maximization of the use of Humboldt results in different areas of application. The overall goal of the Midterm Scenario Call is to achieve a high actuality and high flexibility within the project. Successful evaluation of partners' proposals is bound to the criteria as stated in the official call, article 5.
Limited opportunity for involvement of new partners
Collaboration with EXTERNAL PARTNERS may be considered in particular cases if required by a consortium partner in order to meet the overall evaluation criteria of the call. If you are interested in collaboration, please contact Mr David Ludlow <david.ludlow@uwe.ac.uk> for any advice in terms of content and strategy.
15th May 2008
INSPIRE CONFERENCE (23.-25. June) features Humboldt workshop on Data Harmonisation
Data harmonisation, being one of the key aspects of INSPIRE, is also a core topic of the Humboldt project, which aims at developing processes and tools for data harmonisation. Humboldt partners have considerable experience in spatial data modelling, data and metadata management and have already participated in European data harmonisation projects. As one of the first steps of the Humboldt project, a comprehensive analysis of the state of the art in data harmonisation and data management was undertaken. Key questions to be discussed during the workshop include:
- What are the main data harmonisation requirements of INSPIRE?
- Which are the main data harmonisation issues that were identified in previous cross-border SDI projects?
- Which approaches were taken to tackle these issues (e.g. data harmonisation processes, creation of common data models, methods and languages for the specification of mapping rules, tools for mapping source models to target models?)
- Can best practices be identified in the above mentioned areas?
Further info on speakers and presenters will follow soon. For this year's conference full programme, please refer to the official event website.
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