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Nowadays, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) play an important role in government agencies, at different levels: global, national, and local. They aim to improve the management and sharing of geospatial data. Nonetheless, these SDIs have been developed as information islands, in which a user's query is compared to metadata described only in their own catalog services. The lack of interaction among SDIs limits the potential of these infrastructures in providing geospatial data to a larger audience. This article presents a distributed architecture, based on a federation of SDIs which interact among themselves, using query propagation. This propagation facilitates data discovery and sharing. We also describe a distributed query processing service used to enable the resource discovery in distributed infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The use of High Strength Steel (HSS) S690 in highway bridge decks is not yet widespread. A research program investigated the optimal use of HSS in bridges. A comparative design was performed for a 21.5 m wide highway bridge, with a typical 80 m long inner span and a steel‐concrete composite twin plate girder deck, using the Eurocode standards. Three designs were produced: Design (A) with S355 NL steel grade, Design (B) with HSS S690 QL/QL1, and Design (C), also with HSS S690, but exploring different design options provided by welded joint treatments to improve fatigue and suggest possible enhancement of the present Eurocode rules. General guidelines for the design of highway bridge decks using HSS S690 are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]