COVER STORIES 5 Building INSPIRE: The Spatial Data Infrastructure for Europe continued from cover Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Joint Research Centre or the European Commission. INSPIRE has some characteristics that make it particularly challenging. The most obvious is that it is an infrastructure built by 27 different countries using more than 23 languages. The requirements for multilingual services and interoperability among very different information systems and professional and cultural practices are, therefore, very demanding. This means, for example, that existing standards have to be tested in real distributed and multilingual settings. In the best scenario, all works well, but for a European-wide implementation, there is a need to translate the standards and related guidelines into the relevant languages (International Organization for Standardization [ISO]; Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. [OGC]; and other relevant standards are typically in English only). In other instances, testing has demonstrated that the standards are not mature enough, or leave too much room for different interpretations, and thus require further definition or individual bridges to make different systems interoperate. This can be seen with tests on distributed queries continued on page 6 Annex I Coordinate reference systems Geographical grid systems Geographical names Administrative units Addresses Cadastral parcels The purpose of INSPIRE is to support environmental policy and overcome major barriers still affecting the availability and accessibility of relevant data. These barriers include • Inconsistencies in spatial data collection, where spatial data is often missing or incomplete or, alternatively, the same data is collected twice by different organizations • Lack or incomplete documentation of available spatial data • Lack of compatibility among spatial datasets that cannot, therefore, be combined with others • Incompatible SDI initiatives within a Member State that often function only in isolation • Cultural, institutional, financial, and legal barriers preventing or delaying the sharing of existing spatial data The key elements of the INSPIRE Directive to overcome these barriers include • Metadata to describe existing information resources so data can be more easily found and accessed • Harmonization of key spatial data themes needed to support environmental policies in the European Union • Agreements on network services and technologies to allow discovery, viewing, and downloading of information resources and access to related services • Policy agreements on sharing and access, including licensing and charging • Coordination and monitoring mechanisms INSPIRE addresses 34 key spatial data themes organized in three groups (or Annexes to the Directive) reflecting different levels of harmonization expected and a staged phasing (see table 1). The legal framework of INSPIRE has two main levels. At the first, there is the INSPIRE Directive itself, which sets the objectives to be achieved and asks the Member States to pass their own national legislation establishing their SDIs. This mechanism of European plus national legislation allows each country to define its own way to achieve the objectives agreed upon, taking into account its own institutional characteristics and history of development. As an example, Germany does not have a single SDI but a coordinated framework with 17 SDIs, one for each of its states (Länder) and one at the federal level (which also means that 17 different legal acts had to be passed to implement INSPIRE). Similarly, Belgium will have probably three SDIs, one for each of its regions (Wallonia and Flanders) and one for Brussels. The INSPIRE Directive also requires the establishment of an EU geoportal operated by the European Commission to which the infrastructures of the Member States have to connect. The drawback of having 27 different “flavours” of INSPIRE is that making the system work is undoubtedly more difficult. For this reason, the Directive envisages a second level of legislation, more stringent because it has to be implemented as is and does not require follow-up national legislation. In European terminology, this is called a regulation. Therefore, INSPIRE envisages technical implementing rules in the form of regulations for metadata, harmonization of spatial data and services, network services, data and service sharing policies, and monitoring and reporting indicators to evaluate the extent of the Directive’s implementation and to assess its impact. Each of these regulations needs the approval of the Member States and the European Parliament. As of January 2010, the regulations for metadata, network services (discovery and view), and monitoring and reporting have already been approved. Those for data- and service-sharing policy, network services (transformation and download), and the first set of specifications for the harmonization of data have been approved by the representatives of the Member States and are now under the scrutiny of the European Parliament. Transport networks Hydrography Protected sites Annex II Elevation Land cover Orthoimagery Geology Annex III Statistical units Buildings Soil Land use Human health and safety Utility and governmental services Environmental monitoring facilities Production and industrial facilities Agricultural and aquaculture facilities Population distribution and demography Area management/restriction/regulation zones and reporting units Natural risk zones Atmospheric conditions Meteorological geographical features Oceanographic geographical features Sea regions Bio-geographical regions Habitats and biotopes Species distribution Energy resources Mineral resources Table 1: Key data themes addressed by INSPIRE. or published by other organizations and often other countries. The key components of an SDI are, therefore, catalogues of available resources, documented in a structured way through metadata; agreed-upon access policies and standards; and a set of services to access and download the data to our GIS. In many countries, some key datasets have been identified that are perceived to be of general usefulness to many (the so-called “framework” data in the United States). Priority has therefore been given to documenting them and making them available. Once we have found and downloaded the data we need, we analyze it in our GIS, and finally, we contribute (often but not often enough) to the international pool of knowledge by publishing the results of our analysis so that others can use them. This, of course, is a rather simplistic perspective. SDIs are children of the Internet, without which they would not exist. They are also the response to an increased recognition that the environmental and social phenomena we are called to understand and govern are very complex, and that no single organization has the know-how and the data to do the job alone. Hence, we need to share knowledge and data across multiple organizations in both public and private sectors, and SDIs support this effort. INSPIRE The INSPIRE Directive is a legal act (Directive 2007/2/EC) of the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament setting up an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe based on infrastructures for spatial information established and operated by the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU). For the readers not familiar with the institutional setup of the European Union, it is worth pointing out that the EU is not a federal state but a union of 27 sovereign Member States that agree through a series of international treaties (the latest being the Lisbon Treaty of 2009) to the policy areas in which they wish to share responsibilities and resources (e.g., agricultural, environmental, and regional policies) and those that remain instead the exclusive domain of the national governments (e.g., defense and immigration). The key decision-making bodies are, therefore, the national governments—represented in the Council with a number of votes proportional to the size of the country—and the European Parliament that is elected by universal suffrage every five years. The European Commission is the civil service body of the EU and has the power of proposing legislation (to the Council and European Parliament) and monitoring its implementation once approved. Not being a federal state also means that there is no equivalent to the U.S. federal agencies in respect to the collection of topographic or demographic data like the United States Geological Survey and the Bureau of the Census. All data comes via the responsible organizations in the Member States. As a result, setting up an EU-wide SDI can only be done in a decentralized way, building on the SDIs and related activities established and maintained by the Member States.