INSPIRE Directive Update

Date: 12/9/2008

Sources: www.ec-gis.org/inspire, AGI INSPIRE Working Group

INSPIRE, which stands for INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in the European community, is an EC Directive concerning sharing and harmonisation of spatial datasets across Europe.

The Directive came into force on 15th May 2007 and Member States are required to bring in legislation and procedures to fully comply with the Directive by 15th May 2009. There are also intermediate deadlines for a number of specific areas for adoption of “Implementing Rules” (IR). The dates for “submission for opinion of the INSPIRE committee of Implementing Rules” are:

o        14th May 2008 – for the creation and updating of metadata

o        15th Nov 2008 – for monitoring and reporting

o        15th Nov 2008 - for discovery and view services

o        15th May 2009 – for download services

o        15th May 2009 – for coordinates transformation service

o        15th May 2009 – governing the access rights of use to spatial data sets and services for Community institutions and bodies

o         15th May 2009 – for the interoperability and harmonisation of spatial data sets and services for Annex I spatial data themes

o        15th May 2009 – Provisions of the Directive to be brought into force in Member States

o        15th Nov 2010 – for schema transformation and "invoke spatial data service" services

o        15th May 2012 – for the interoperability and harmonisation of spatial data sets and services for Annex II and III spatial data themes

The full INSPIRE Roadmap can be found here.

The INSPIRE Directive has considerable implications for the HA. The Association for Geographic Information (AGI) writes:

“Potentially all users and prospective users of spatial information will be affected. All public bodies will be required to create metadata (descriptions of the spatial data they make available), and to provide access to data that they have collected or created, in standard form through the network services. This will require much greater openness and, in many cases, more expertise than is often currently available.”

Metadata is loosely defined as “data about data”; it describes how data is formatted and the interfaces used to access the data, but does not consist of the actual data itself. An ITS Registry exists (www.itsregistry.co.uk), which is a repository of data definitions and data models, to aid harmonisation across different systems and aims to avoid re-invention and duplication of effort. The ITS Radar International ITS Metadata Registry factsheet (Feb 2007) contains further information.

The other main challenge is to provide access to data in standard form, because the HA does not widely adopt approaches built on the 1SO 19100 standards at present. Conformance to a standardised approach could be both complex and costly.

Full details of the INSPIRE Directive can be found on the official website.

ITS Radar International will continue to monitor developments

Keywords:  European Commission, Geographic information, Policy, Standard