11th AGILE International Conference on Geographic Information Science 2008 Page 1 of 4 University of Girona, Spain Development of a Coastal SDI using GeoFOSS Emmanuel Stefanakis 1 and Poulicos Prastacos 2,3 1 Harokopio University of Athens, Department of Geography, Athens, Greece 2 Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH), Heraklion, Greece 3 InfoCharta Ltd, STEP-C, Heraklion, Greece {estef@hua.gr; poulicos@iacm.forth.gr} 1. INTRODUCTION At the Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH) we are currently running a project towards the development of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) for the coastal zone of Heraklion prefecture. The SDI hosts the geographic content collected for the coastal zone, accompanied with rich metadata. Additionally, effective methods to discover and visualize this content and sophisticated software and tools to support application domains related to coastal management have been implemented. Provided the contemporary trend towards the adoption of free and open source software (OSGeo), we decided to generate, under this project, two parallel SDIs for the coastal zone at Heraklion: (a) one SDI using commercial software systems, and (b) an alternative SDI using merely Geographic Free and Open Source Software (GeoFOSS). The scope of this paper is to present in brief the architecture, the development phases and the servers of the latter SDI, i.e., the coastal SDI based on GeoFOSS. 2. ARCHITECTURE AND SYSTEMS The SDI of the coastal zone at Heraklion accommodates a series of geospatial data layers (Shapefiles and GeoTiff images) collected based on the user and application needs as regards to the coastal management. The SDI also introduces geospatial mashups provided by other servers on the web (e.g., Google Maps, NASA JPL Portal Nasa’s WMS, Integrated CEOS European Data Server). The architecture, the software systems and the specifications adopted are shown in Figure 1. The architecture is compatible with the proposal for GeoFOSS SDI (Ticheler 2007, OSGeo) and follows the conceptual three-tier architecture for SDI’s (Evans 2003). At the bottom layer, reside the SDI databases and database management systems. The geospatial layers are inserted into Postgresql/PostGIS in order to achieve a more efficient data management. In the middle layer (middleware) reside all the services that assist the accessibility to the data repositories. This SDI has two main servers, i.e., the Map Server and the Catalog Server. These two servers will serve the geospatial content on the web based on standard interfaces (e.g., WMS, WFS, WCS, ISO 19115/139) to facilitate the worldwide access to and the use of online geospatial data. At the top layer (the client) reside the users and applications. The access to the SDI geospatial content is possible through either a desktop or a web client. 3. PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT The development of the coastal SDI using GeoFOSS comprises of four main phases: