Geoportal GS Soil Poland

Abstract

At European level, initiatives are undertaken in recent years and projects run leading to the implementation of the INSPIRE Directive. An example is the GS Soil project initiated by the Ministry of Environment of Lower Saxony in which 34 institutions participated, from different European countries, including Warsaw University of Technology. Within the framework of this project, spatial data on soils was described and catalogued in most European countries (also in Poland). Within separate tasks, the scope and standards for information technology concerning metadata of soils were defined.
The paper presents overall characteristics of the tasks within the project GS Soil, including the resulting Geoportal GS Soil, emphasizing in particular the subject of metadata, but also issues relating to the organization and harmonization of data, as well as technical and semantic interoperability. The results for Poland are also shown, including general characteristics of soil metadata and the created service based on WMS and WFS using ESRI's ArcGIS Server tools for sharing data on soils. In the first phase, the portal will be created and developed by the Warsaw University of Technology. In subsequent years, other institutions will be included. The obtained results of the project should facilitate the access to spatial data on soils.