A standardised approach for serving environmental monitoring data compliant with OGC APIs

Abstract

Highlighting the importance of environmental monitoring data and its management, and the usage of standards for providing interoperability to geospatial information, we present and document the implementation of ROSE-API (Reusable Open Source Environmental-Data-Management OGC API), an OGC API-compliant web service for exposing feature data and georeferenced timeseries, as the ones usually generated by environmental monitoring networks. Multiple OGC API standards that align with the goal of exposing environmental data were implemented, in particular OGC API - Features, Environmental Data Retrieval (EDR), and Processes. With interoperability and flexibility in mind, ROSE-API allows discovery and processing capabilities for environmental monitoring data, exposing it in standardised formats and structures suitable for modern internet usage, allowing spatial and non-spatial filtering, and providing server-side processing capabilities. We tested our implementation with 13 years of air quality observations, consisting of more than 50 million data points, to address its compliance with the implemented OGC APIs, performance metrics, and processing capabilities.