Waymotion built the platform, together with LNEG's Geoscientific Information Unit, that publishes the laboratory's geology and energy data on open standards — from the Geological Map of Portugal to the national energy resource atlases.
The National Laboratory for Energy and Geology (LNEG) has launched its OGC API platform, dedicated to publishing high-value datasets in an open, interoperable format. Waymotion built the platform together with LNEG’s Geoscientific Information Unit, and it is integrated into the laboratory’s geoPortal.
More than making data available, the real challenge of digital transformation is making public information genuinely accessible, interoperable and reusable. That is the difference between a file you download and a service you query.
What is published
The platform launched with more than sixty collections, covering a large part of the laboratory’s geoscientific holdings:
- The Geological Map of Portugal, as harmonised data at 1:1,000,000, 1:200,000 and 1:50,000 — lithologies, representative ages, faults and boreholes.
- The Hydrogeological Map of Portugal at 1:200,000, with aquifer classification and suitability, springs, hydrochemistry and hydromineral resources.
- Hydrogeological resources: aquifer systems, hydrogeological units and water points.
- SIORMINP, the mineral occurrences inventory, with more than five thousand records.
- SondaBase, the borehole database.
- The Geothermal Atlas: heat flow density, geothermal gradient, and temperatures at 250, 500, 1,000, 2,000 and 5,000 metres depth.
- The Wind Atlas and OffshorePlan, covering the wind resource at 20, 80 and 100 metres and the wave energy resource.
Why an OGC API
The published data falls under the “Earth observation and environment” thematic category of the high-value datasets defined by Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138, which requires such data to be made available in machine-readable form, through APIs, and without access barriers.
The OGC API standards are the generation that follows WMS and WFS: instead of a bespoke protocol, a REST API described in OpenAPI, answering in GeoJSON and in HTML at the same URL. In practice that means one collection serves a map viewer, an analysis script and a public portal, with no conversion in between.
LNEG’s platform implements the OGC API — Features conformance classes (parts 1 to 5, including coordinate reference systems, queryables and schemas), along with Maps and Tiles, the latter with vector tiles. Collection naming follows the INSPIRE Directive’s data types, which keeps the datasets aligned with the rest of the European spatial information infrastructure.
From the consumer’s side, querying the mineral occurrences inventory is one line:
curl "https://ogcapi.lneg.pt/collections/siorminp-mineral-occurrences/items?f=json&limit=10"The response is GeoJSON, with coordinates already in WGS 84 and the original attributes preserved — genesis, size, local and regional geology, viability axes. There is no access request, no account to register and no client to install.
A step in modernising LNEG’s SDI
The tool was developed under the DataIntel project, funded by Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan, and forms part of the modernisation of LNEG’s Spatial Data Infrastructure.
The value of this work is measured on three fronts: accessibility, because geoscientific information is now within reach of citizens, researchers, companies and public administration; interoperability, because consuming the data no longer requires knowing the system it came from; and economic value, because scientific knowledge produced in Portugal becomes raw material for whoever builds on top of it.
Our thanks to the LNEG team for their collaboration throughout the project.
Migrating the data from the source systems into this platform is handled by an ETL orchestrator we built for the purpose. We told that story in “Why We Built Wayler”.
