Visualising spatial web service growth across Europe

Abstract

Service quality is essential for broadening the adoption and use of data via APIs and online services. The success of any software that use these services will be dependent on the quality the services it uses. Web services are provided by a myriad of different organisations and service providers with different resources and technical capabilities, which inevitably raises the question whether a developer interested in the services can trust them or not. Availability of such services is a crucial factor in service quality: it measures how reliable a service is under normal conditions. If a service is not available, the service is of no use regardless of how good quality data it may serve when functional. Therefore it can be argued that availability is the most important measure of service quality. It is however a non-trivial task to determine the level of availability. This paper revolves around the availability of spatial web services in Europe. This kind of services are used by thousands of map applications and they serve as the bedrock of INSPIRE, which is a Europe-wide effort to harmonize both spatial data and how this data is accessed. Spatial web services are implemented using widely adopted standard protocols that make data sharing and interoperability between applications straightforward. Spatineo has released a web application that visualises the availability of spatial web services in Europe. The Service Map showcases countries and organisations in Europe that provide reliable services and highlights areas that need attention. The availability data is collected by Spatineo who specializes in quality of service and the improvement of European spatial data infrastructure.