Iria Enrique (Institute of Statistics and Cartography of Andalusia)
Nowadays, integration of statistical and geospatial information is of great interest to public administrations, economic and social agents, researchers or citizens in general, because it leads to new possibilities for the use of data. It also provides opportunities to cover relevant information gaps at a low cost that would not be possible to achieve in other ways. Nevertheless, integration, exchange and dissemination of information should not be done no matter how but following national, European and international standards, instead. Standards such as the European Statistics Code of Practice or regulations for the development of Directive 2007/2/EC, establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) and the National Interoperability Scheme, ensure comparability and support data integration. Recently, significant improvements have been achieved regarding statistical and geospatial information integration and the infrastructures required for its data management, processes and data dissemination. Following Global Statistical Geospatial Framework principles, this communication presents the open source geospatial architecture implemented at the Institute of Statistics and Cartography of Andalusia for the integration of statistical and geospatial information. From a fundamental geocoding infrastructure developed in Python, to geocoded unit record data management environment in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS architecture, where information can be consolidated to regional aggregates and then uploaded to an open source server (Geoserver). Spatial data is the disseminated to users through interoperable web services for visualization and download. In addition, to show georeferenced information we work on heavy QGIS client (desktop GIS, also open source), in order to avoid additional sofware costs.