You may have heard about the GeoCat Bridge plugin for ArcMAP. A plugin to facilitate hybrid open source/proprietary environments. We’re planning a similar tool for QGIS. We'll present the current status and challenges in this presentation. Main goal of this plugin is to ‘facilitate publication to an open OGC/INSPIRE SDI as easy as possible’. To facilitate this we apply various principles:

• Publish data as layer/coverage/featuretype in GeoServer or Mapserver
• Require minimal metadata to comply to OGC/INSPIRE
• Register datasets in a catalog with proper linkage to/from the data services
• Migrate data to GeoPackage, Postgres or reference existing data

An important aspect to focus on is metadata management. Last year an initiative started to improve metadata management in QGIS. Some major improvements have been introduced. The Bridge tool will benefit from these developments. New options are the ability to import, export, validate and publish INSPIRE/ISO metadata. Improve SLD creation (for usage in Geoserver). Proper linkage between the catalog and the gis server.