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Many organisations encounter obstacles to accessing data they need to process in the context of their role of coordinating energy policies cycle at the provincial/regional level.
In this use case, one of the several developed under the Energy & Location Applications, the aim is to show the benefits of harmonising and improving the interoperability and the usability of the data contained in the Sustainable Energy Action Plans to support the coordination of energy policies at the provincial or regional level.
In the following sections, we provide more information on the use case "Interoperability of SECAP (Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan) data".
Show the benefits of harmonising and improving the interoperability and the usability of the data contained in the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP) to support the coordination of energy policies at the provincial or regional level.
The methodologies developed in the use case have been tested with the 100+ SECAPs produced by Local Authorities of the Autonomous Province of Trento in Italy with the support of APRIE (Energy Agency of the Province) in its coordinator role of the energy policies at the provincial level.
Entities, like Agenzia provinciale per le risorse idriche e l’energia - APRIE, often encounter obstacles to accessing data they need to process in the context of their role of coordinating energy policies cycle at the provincial/regional level.
A clear example is represented by data contained in the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAPs) produced by the Local Authorities (Municipalities or groups of Municipalities) signatory of the Covenant of Mayors (CoM), e.g. :
- breakdown of emission inventories per sector (residential buildings, nonresidential buildings, public transport, etc.) and
- details of prevention and/or mitigation actions (sector of intervention, timeframe, stakeholders involved, allocated budgets, estimated impacts, etc.).
Currently, Local Authorities signatories of CoM prepare the data according to a template and, using a web interface, send the data directly to the CoM Office in Brussels, which, after proper quality checks, ingests the data in a database for internal purposes and publishes the entire SECAPs on the CoM website, as open data but in PDF format.
The poor interoperability of data contained in tables and graphs embedded in pdf documents represents, therefore, an obstacle for further data processing and territorial analyses at the provincial/regional level, based on the comparison, combination or aggregation of data at the municipal level.
Agenzia provinciale per le risorse idriche e l’energia - APRIE
The use case has been broken down into the following steps:
- Analysis of source data model, examining a set of tables extracted from the CoM database and the complete DB structure (accessing only data related to the municipalities coordinated by Province of Trento).
- Analysis of a set of INSPIRE core data models candidate for the design of the target data model and identification of Area Management/Restriction/Regulation Zones and Reporting Units (AM) as the best candidate.
- Extension of the INSPIRE AM data model, adding feature types and attributes needed to map all the information present in the SECAP.
- Transformation of a sample source datasets (SECAP data of the Municipalities coordinated by the Province of Trento) according to the INSPIRE AM extended target data model.
- Publication of the sample transformed data through download and view services.
A methodology to improve the interoperability and usability of the data contained in the Sustainable Energy Action Plans produced by the Local Authorities signatory of the Covenant of Mayors has been designed, implemented and tested with the 100+ SECAPs produced by Local Authorities of the Autonomous Province of Trento in Italy.
The methodology to harmonise SECAP data, reuses the INSPIRE approach to define a target data model, transform the source data according to the target data model, create network service to view and download the transformed data and create metadata to discover transformed data and related network services.
The target data model developed (both as UML conceptual model and as XSD physical model) is an extension of the INSPIRE Area Management/Restriction/Regulation Zones and Reporting Units (AM) core data model, adding feature types and attributes needed to map all the information present in the SECAP.
The output of the harmonisation process consisted in a harmonised data in GML 3.2.1 format, a deegree workspace containing all the components for WMS and WFS deployment, the components of an Atom download service and two XML metadata files, one related to the harmonised data and one to the Atom download service.
The harmonised dataset is discoverable in the Italian National Catalogue of Geospatial Data, the Italian National Catalogue of Open Data, and the European Data Portal.
An example of harmonised SECAP data is shown in the following figure.
Increased interoperability and improved usability of harmonised SECAP data better support the coordination of the energy policies cycle at the provincial or regional level.
The same approach could also be adopted at the CoM office level to support its coordination role at the European and global levels.
Harmonised output data (SECAP data of the Province of Trento - IT):
