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 In- frastructure. 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 manage- ment 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.