Govaere, J.,  Fernandez-Alonso, M.,  Meirte, D.,  Mergen, P.,  De Coninck , E.,  De Ceukelaire , M.,  Demarée, G.,  Van Hauteghem , H.,  Heylen, C. & Smolders, C. 2005. ‘The Belgian Generalized Natural Sciences Online and Spatial Information System project GNOSIS’. Poster presented at the Taxonomic Databases Working Group 2005 Annual Meeting, Biodiversity Informatics - Enhancing the Taxonomic Work Process; St Petersburg, Russia. Book of abstracts.

Conference abstract

GNOSIS standing for “Generalized Natural Sciences Online and Spatial Information System” is a collaborative GIS project funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office. It regroups partners from different disciplines (meteorology, zoology and geology) and a software company (GIM). There are three data providing organisations with information coming from five different departments. As the system had to be flexible and stay as closely as possible to the data owners or custodians, a decentralized interoperable solution based on the usage of Open GIS Standards (OGC standards) was preferred. The collaborators to the GNOSIS project pay attention to remain compliant with the EU Commission Proposal for a Directive “Establishing an infrastructure for spatial information in the Community (INSPIRE)”. The system aims to offer a multilingual GIS web portal including various web services. The current version offers Web Map Services (WMS), Web Map Context (WMC), Web Feature Services (WFS) and Catalogue Services for the Web (CSW). The determination of the metadata profile, the multilingual keyword search and the harmonisation of the partners data were the most challenging issues during the first phase of this ambitious project. In its second phase GNOSIS will have to implement the comments of the end-user review committee and extend the number of participants. The scientific partner institutions are actively contributing to this project by providing access to several high quality datasets and geographical information of zoological, geological and meteorological nature.