The RITMARE Starter Kit bottom-up capacity building for geospatial data providers

Capacity building by data providers is a fundamental task in the creation of a decentralized Spatial Data Infrastructure. This challenge has been tackled in the RITMARE Flagship Project by providing the Starter Kit, a comprehensive set of domain-oriented software components that exposes standard services for the management of geospatial information. We report on the characteristics of this toolkit, developed by the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), particularly with regard to the underlying service-oriented architecture and the novel semantics-aware methodology that is proposed for metadata editing.