I have to admit I haven’t kept up with INSPIRE as well as I should, but today I had a chance to catch up on this major European SDI (spatial data infrastructure) initiative. Like all major government programs, you can easily get lost in the documents, so if you’d like to get up to speed quickly, try this nice 3-page status document from 2008-11-18.

After reading that, you’ll be ready to dig into some of the technical documents in this archive. I was pleased to see that OGC’s perspective on spatial data services and interoperability is at the heart of these documents. However, since I love to throw at least one provocative thought in every blog post, I will take issue with the rationale for the recommendation to standardize on SOAP services, which is found in version 3.0 of the Network Services Architecture. On page 13 the authors say SOAP web services are: the standard information technology for SOA; ensure smooth and complete integration in development environments; and yield a direct and seamless integration with other system environments. If you’ve had to implement a SOAP service, has this been your experience? Mine has been that I can eventually make it work, but it’s never smooth or seamless, especially when, for example, integrating between two different development platforms like Java and .NET. RPC web services are much smoother.