IDEE: Spain

Michael Gould
Lenguajes y Sistemas Informaticos / Information Systems Department
Universitat Jaume I
E-12080 Castellón (Spain)
email: gould@lsi.uji.es

Spain's Spatial Data Infrastructure portal, "IDEE" (in English), offers this quote from "El hacedor," a collection of prose pieces, parables, and poems by the Argentinian writer J. L. Borges:

Borges' words are followed by this explanation: "The IDEE is a much more effective way of achieving Borges' dream without having to create a map the size of the Empire."

The IDEE initiative began in 2002 when the National Geographic Council (Consejo Superior Geográfico, or CSG) was re-convened after several years of inactivity. The CSG has among its missions the creation and support of the Spanish spatial data infrastructure (SDI) at the national level. The CSG includes representatives from all the national ministries having to do with geographic information, and also includes the cadastral agency, statistics agency and military mapping agencies, as well as representatives from the 17 regional governments within Spain. The presidency of the CSG resides in the Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN), the main national mapping agency, within the Ministry of Public Works (Fomento). The IGN funds an initial node of the IDEE, but the CSG governs it, largely through its working groups.

The IDEE working groups are modelled after similar working groups which convened at the European level a few years back to define the INSPIRE (European SDI) architecture, standards, and political rules. The INSPIRE rules include adherence to ISO TC211 and OGC standards where possible. IDEE has already adopted many of the INSPIRE recommendations, including the recommendation that a national SDI should not create new data and should not reinvent the wheel, rather it should connect regional SDIs which adopt the standards and specifications of INSPIRE. In the INSPIRE vision, all the European nations' national data, each an aggregation of local data, would likewise be aggregated via INSPIRE portal links to form the European SDI. This vision of local production and maintenance of a nation's data (which is also the vision of the National Map in the US) can only be achieved through adherence to the ISO TC211 and OGC standards.

Figure 3. Map visualization (WMS) of the Castellón area, as seen on IGN basic topographic data.

In 2004 the IGN signed an agreement with University of Zaragoza --representing a consortium called TeIDE which includes the University Jaume I of Castellón and Politechnic University of Madrid-- to design and build the main technology components of a standards-based Spanish SDI geoportal which would include an underlying OGC-compliant catalog server, a geospatial metadata editor (now available as freeware on the portal), and an OGC-compliant web map server. The first version of the portal is running at the URL listed above.

IGN and the 3 university partners are OGC members.