July 2011 Archives

 ....or in English: "Snowflake goes to Spain!"

As we see the growing popularity of open standards, here at Snowflake we get many requests for our XML and GML training courses from all over the world. One of these requests came from Centro de Calculo de Alava S.A. (or CCASA for short) in the Basque region in northern Spain. CCASA is a public sector organisation and provides IT and geospatial services for the Provincial Council of Alava.

Fortunately I was the lucky one to travel down to the beautiful city of Vitoria-Gasteiz to train a group of delegates from a variety of public and private organisations in and around the Basque region. The 4 days training covered our XML Primer, GML Fundamentals and GML Hands On courses. 

At the same time I was training in Spain, my colleague Debbie was running the same training courses in parallel for one of our customers in The Netherlands. A first for Snowflake.

El Profesor

The training location must have been one of the most secure places I have ever trained at. As the training took place at the offices of the Basque police you can imagine that security was pretty tight. Detailed passport control on entering and leaving the place, and of course many barriers and gates everywhere. Thankfully body searches were not necessary. After a couple days the guards started to recognise my face...and my inability to speak more than two words of coherent Spanish....and I was just known as "El Profesor" and all gates and barriers opened before me.

Different cultures

One of the great things about training oversees is the change in culture, especially when it comes to food. Instead of having a brief lunch break around noon, in Spain lunch is a much more serious business. Lunch is the main meal of the day and usually starts around 3pm and lasts for at least two hours. Therefore we decided to adopt the national traditions and change the standard start and end times of the training. This meant starting early (which is very early for me) and ending around lunchtime. 

A welcome break formed the mid-morning coffee breaks at the neighbouring cafe for a quick strong coffee and a pinxto (little snacks).

Putting training in action

During the four days we covered all aspects of the XML and GML standards. Because CCASA recently developed a new application schema for underground infrastructure themselves, they managed to put their newly gained knowledge to practise immediately and improve the application schema during the training course. For me personally that is the real aim of any training course: Putting new knowledge to practise as soon as possible.

As we use the Treasure Island narritive quite extensively in our GML Hands On training all delegates were handed a copy of the famous Treasure Island novel by Robert Louis Stevenson as a memento.  Quite ironic though, to search for a Spanish treasure with a class full of Spanish students....

Are you interested in learning more about the XML and GML standards....or how you can use them for some good ol' treasure hunting....? Contact us or have a look on our training pages on the Snowflake website.

Richard Rombouts | Technical Sales Manager | richard.rombouts@snowflakesoftware.com |

www.twitter.com/sflakesoftware | www.twitter.com/richrombouts |

Press Release

Snowflake Software, a participating organisation in the Annex II & III data specification testing, announced its support for testing at the INSPIRE Conference in Edinburgh.

Taking a multifaceted approach, Snowflake aims to support participants in Annex II & III testing with their ‘You do it; we do it; we do it together’ philosophy, with an emphasis on supporting organisations through the testing process in a way that best suits their needs. Testing runs for four months from 20 June to 21 October 2011.

The new service complements Snowflake’s existing ‘INSPIRE as a Service’ model and offers a number of options for organisations to transform their data into INSPIRE compliant data:

• You do it – Participants can make use of a free, fully extended GO Publisher licence to carry out their own data specification testing;
• We do it – Snowflake will perform the data transformations on behalf of the participating organisation;
• We do it together – Participants can attend a testing workshop which includes practical sessions to perform the data specification testing and required transformations.

Ian Painter, Managing Director of Snowflake Software comments:
“In terms of implementation, Annex II and Annex III really widens the reach of INSPIRE. Where in Annex I the majority of the data can be sourced from National Mapping Agencies and larger government departments, data in Annex II and Annex III impacts pretty much all government inclusive of local, provincial and central; from big departments to small teams; from data in enterprise databases to data in spreadsheets.”

He adds:
“In my view, this poses a real challenge for INSPIRE from both a budgetary and technical point of view. To address this, Snowflake launched its 'You do it, we do it, we do it together' campaign to cover the Annex II & III testing and a wider bureau service for Annex I implementation.”

Snowflake Software is well placed to support organisations with data testing having been actively involved with the Annex I data specification testing and with Debbie Wilson (Snowflake Software INSPIRE Domain expert) being an INSPIRE Editor on the Annex III Area Management theme.

Participating organisations looking for support with Annex II & III testing should contact Snowflake Software on 0044 (0) 23 8023 8232 or info@snowflakesoftware.com.

After wrapping up the INSPIRE 2011 Conference in Edinburgh I took some time out to talk to my good friend Steven Ramage from the Open Geospatial Consortium. In this quick 10min chat we talk all things Open Standards, a bit of WFS and the OGC Testbed process.

This year Richard, Debbie and I headed to the 2011 INSPIRE Conference in what turned out to be a sunny Edinburgh. Snowflake has had a stand for the last 3 years and this year was no exception. Aside from our stand Debbie was running an INSPIRE: Back to Basics workshop and Richard was talking about the work our partner Epsilon Italia has been doing within the EU Nature SDI programme - leaving me to kick back - I mean work the stand and network.

What is INSPIRE?

From the positive feedback I received, it seems Debbie's talk found a gap in the conference Agenda by answering the fundamental question - What is INSPIRE?

Debbie's talk was a subset of our INSPIRE Fundamentals training course mashed up with the results of the INSPIRE Quiz we ran last year.  The thing is with all this implementation work kicking off, INSPIRE people forget that new organisations continue to come across INSPIRE for the very first time.

Looking at the agenda there was talk after talk about experiences, lessons learned and progress made but nothing going back to the start and explaining the basics. Interestingly I was talking to a lady from Canada about Debbie's talk and she mentioned she was over to see if the best practices of INSPIRE could be reused within Canadian SDI initiatives. Looks like people are looking to implement INSPIRE principles even if you they don't have to under EU legislation.

Implementation experiences

I didn't go with the team to Poland last year, but the numbers were certainly up from Rotterdam, I heard gossip of somewhere between 650-800 attendee - which is a big increase. The general theme this year was implementation experiences, which is reassuring, as this year was the first time an implementation deadline had passed (initial Annex I metadata and View Services). 

Practical experience

Richard's talk on Thursday was about our experience within the Nature SDI programme. Sharing the stage with our good friend Giacomo Martirano from Epsilon Italia, Richard and Giacomo explained how Epsilon Italia used GO Publisher to create INSPIRE data valid to the Protected Sites schema, subsequently deploying an Advanced Download - Direct Access service via our WFS 2.0 implementation.  

The main story we were getting across was that all this could be done without coding, using a COTS product out of the box.

Annex II & III testing

Aside from practical experience, the other big news was the release of the INSPIRE Annex II and Annex III schemas.  We know this all too well, with Debbie being an INSPIRE Editor on the Annex III Area Management theme. She's been working flat out with the drafting team to get the first cut of the model and schema out in time for the conference.  In terms of implementation, Annex II and Annex III really widens the reach of INSPIRE. Where in Annex I the majority of the data can be sourced from National Mapping Agencies and larger government departments, data in Annex II and Annex III impacts pretty much all of government inclusive of local, provincial and central, from big departments to small teams, from data in enterprise databases to data in spreadsheets.

In my view, this is real challenge for INSPIRE, getting the little guys to join in was always going to be a hard task both from a budget point of view and from a technical point of view.  To address this Snowflake launched its 'You do it, We do it, We do it together' campaign to cover the Annex II & III testing and a wider bureau service for  Annex I implementation. This new offering provides a number of options for organisations to transform their data into  INSPIRE compliant data:

1) You do it, by using GO Publisher directly (we're providing it for FREE for all registered Annex II & III testers),

2) We do it, you throw your data our way and we'll transform it (for a fixed fee per dataset), or

3) We do it together by running a joint workshop with the aim of transforming your data together.

There you go, three simple options to tick the INSPIRE box.  

Finally, let's talk testing and standards with Steven Ramage

So after a busy 5 days it was time to pack up and head down down South. Before I caught the plane back I caught up with my good friend Steven Ramage from Open Geospatial Consortium and we had a quick chat on all things standards and OGC test beds. You can catch our 10 min video here: http://blogs.snowflakesoftware.com/news/2011/07/talking-testbeds-and-standards-with-steven-ramage-from-ogc.htm

Until the next time....