IMP - INSPIRE Metadata ParserPHP based metadata parser for INSPIRE data

IMP - INSPIRE Metadata Parser

As part of the INSPIRE directive (INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in Europe;, "Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 14 March 2007 establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community") are more and more spatial data via appropriate Catalog Services made searchable and retrievable.

The OGC Catalog Services, Web Catalogue Service (CS-W), provide information on timeliness, quality, spatial coverage and origin of spatial data, spatial data services and applications. Technically, according to the INSPIRE metadata profile as XML files will be transferred. The complexity of the XML data, makes it hard to read out the requested information needed for the user. The direct involvement in (web based) applications is also not possible. To meet these requirements a corresponding XML processor (parser) must be present. IMP (INSPIRE metadata parser) realizes such a parser software



IMP is implemented in object-oriented PHP, and provides an XML parser for a common subset of the by INSPIRE required tags. Besides the return as a native PHP object a couple of different interfaces returning different data types are offered:

• JSON - for further processing in JavaScript applications
• JSONP - for further processing in JavaScript applications
• HTML overview/summary - A HTML table with a summarized overview of the data
• HTML INSPIRE table view - A styled HTML table with the INSPIRE tags
• PDF - A summarized overview of the data as PDF document
• OpenLayers Features - A JavaScript array of OpenLayers.Feature objects representing the BBOXes of the single data sets

IMP expects as input parameters a "GetRecordsResponse," the response document of a CS-W.



The return value JSON / JSONP makes it much easier to process than the original XML for many applications and it is also better suited for network traffic in performance terms. For the first time IMP was implemented during the implementation of the Geoportal Brandenburg and is also used in the Geoportal Baden-Württemberg (with the metadata sofware Geonetwork Open Source Software).