A Spatial Data Infrastructure Using Modern Standards: Lessons Learned from the eMOTIONAL Cities Project

The environment we live in affects our mental health and well-being. The eMOTIONAL Cities project has set out to understand how the natural and built environment can shape the feelings and emotions of those who experience it. Employing a cross-disciplinary, data-driven approach, the project generated numerous datasets from traditional GIS-based fields like urban planning and from other disciplines such as neuroscience. The common denominator between all these datasets is the geospatial dimension. A primary goal was to assemble these disparate datasets into a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), enabling scientists and eventually the general public to discover and access the data for analysis and decision-making purposes.Standards are crucial for ensuring interoperability, data consistency, and efficiency across diverse applications and platforms and thus they are at the core of every SDI. OGC API is a family of modern Standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), which leverages modern web technologies such as OpenAPI, REST and JSON. Although very appealing to web developers, they are relatively new compared to the first generation of OGC Web Services (e.g.: WFS, WMS). The eMOTIONAL Cities SDI demonstrates that it is now possible to share geospatial data using OGC API with a stack of Free and Open Source Software. In this article we share our journey during the process of implementing the SDI, and how we navigated the technological and human challenges of adopting emerging technologies in constant development.