challenge. The INSPIRE forum is one way to ad- the demand far outstrips the supply, and often, the dress this challenge, but managing expectations, funding to support these projects is limited to a ensuring real participation, and delivering the few years, typically three or four. An interesting benefits are key aspects we constantly need to effort to overcome this short-term funding probfocus on. lem is represented by the Vespucci Initiative for Another facet, which is even more important, the Advancement of Geographic Information (GI) is the organizational challenge in the Member Science (www.vespucci.org), a not-for-profit, States to implement INSPIRE. The INSPIRE self-funded initiative bringing together leading Directive asks Member States to establish and GI scientists and practitioners in intensive weekmaintain their SDIs, nominate an organization long courses to foster interaction and exchange as a contact point with the Commission, and set of experience along the “training the trainers” up appropriate coordinating mechanisms, all of formula. After eight years of operation, some which have given rise to a flurry of activity across 500 participants have lived the Vespucci experiEurope. In many countries, SDIs already exist and ence, and thousands more will have benefited work well at national and subnational levels. So from the indirect effects of being trained by the the effort is more focused on agreeing on a divi- Vespucci alumni. sion of responsibility than in setting up new structures. In other countries, INSPIRE offers an opportunity for the organizations that have been leading SDI developments for years to get their just recognition and acquire new status and legitimacy. Of course, the difficult financial climate of this period makes it potentially more challenging to invest in new infrastructures and ways of working. Hence, the challenges in most countries are to leverage resources available from different sources (European, national, international) and/or ensure strong synergy between the investment required by INSPIRE and those committed in related projects, for example, in the framework of e-government. In this sense, the work needed is critical not only to align sources of funding but also to ensure that initiatives, standards, systems, and deployments are well coordinated and that they do not duplicate, or contradict, each other. Readers of this article who are familiar with large public-sector organizations will know how challenging this may prove to be. Underpinning this organizational challenge are the key issues of awareness, education, and training. Although we have involved The INSPIRE geoportal (www.inspire-geoportal.eu). thousands of people in the development of INSPIRE, and most national-level organizations Technical: The main challenge here is to develop in the Member States are aware of this initiative, and maintain an infrastructure that works and that there is still much to do. Even in the organizations delivers added value. As indicated earlier, the suite involved in INSPIRE, sometimes only a few of international standards and specifications availpeople are actively participating, and the level of able is sometimes not mature enough to deliver awareness of INSPIRE and its future impacts may or is subject to different interpretations, change, be lost to other parts of the same organization. and inconsistencies. To give one small example, Moreover, many public-sector administrations at the core of SDIs is metadata. The international at the subnational level still have limited or no standards for metadata for datasets and services knowledge of INSPIRE. This is partly due to are ISO 19115 and ISO 19119, respectively. (1) insufficient dissemination efforts in the The application schema for both is ISO 19139, Member States; (2) local and regional authorities but these schemas can be found at two different only becoming more directly involved when the locations: the ISO repository for official standards data themes they are responsible for, which are and the Open Geospatial Consortium Schema mainly in Annexes II and III, are addressed by Repository. Unfortunately, the schemas available INSPIRE; and (3) the complexity of the technical at these two sites differ because of the different documentation being produced at the present time, versions of Geography Markup Language (GML) which very few people can understand or use. This they use. brings us to the education and training issues. Even This is now being addressed, but it is just one if we take a very simplified view of an SDI and example of the many problems one has to face assume that all it involves is creating metadata and in practice. The devil is always in the details, and setting up OGC-compliant services for discovery, in the case of INSPIRE, we took the view that it view, and access, then where are the technicians was not feasible to include all the very detailed versed in the relevant standards and technologies specifications down to rules for encoding into a who will be able to implement these services legal act, as any change in standards, technologies, across hundreds of datasets in the thousands of or- or good practice would then require lengthy proganizations across Europe? Who is training them? cedures to amend the legislation. As a result, the Where are the technical colleges and universities INSPIRE implementing rules are short and only forming such competent technical staff? Where is say what functionalities are required, leaving the the training material consistently being designed detailed implementation to nonbinding guidelines and translated across Europe so that everybody documents. This has its drawbacks, as we cannot implements exactly the same specifications? And, guarantee that everyone will use the guidelines where are the courses to train professional users and that interoperability will be achieved imme(city planners, environmental engineers, social diately. On the other hand, experience has shown scientists, etc.) on the added value of the SDI to that we are still making small adjustments to the their work? The answer, of course, is that we still guidelines for metadata two years after their aphave to build up this capacity. proval. Had they been set in tablets of stone (i.e., There have been notable efforts in respect legally binding), there is no way that we could be to the professional users such as the Center for able to make any change fast enough. Spatially Integrated Social Science in the United So, in practice, we adopted a more pragmatic States (www.csiss.org) and several EU-funded approach, setting up an Initial Operating Capability projects in Europe (e.g., www.vesta-gis.eu), but Task Force with representatives from the agencies in charge in every country to implement INSPIRE. With them we can discuss in detail how they are implementing their services, what seems to work, and what does not; make the necessary changes and adjustments; and disseminate good practice, as well as share tools (and reduce costs). INSPIRE is a process, not just an artifact! A second challenge is to facilitate the transition from a spatial data infrastructure perspective, that is, the “extended GIS metaphor” used in the introduction, which only addresses relatively few technical experts, toward a spatial information infrastructure, a service providing information products and analyses that are of wider use to nonexperts. This requires turning many of the functionalities and analytic processes encoded in number environmental and geographic infor7 C O V E Rof S Tfrom academia,S O R I E government, and mation scientists the private sector to consider the changes that have taken place since the 1998 Digital Earth speech by U.S. Vice President Al Gore (www.isde5. org/al_gore_speech.htm). The meeting was an opportunity to consider the major technological developments that have made it possible to bring the experience of Digital Earth to hundreds of millions of people in their homes and desktops. It also reviewed the many public-sector-led initiatives aimed at organizing geographic information (SDIs and INSPIRE, the Global Earth Observation System of Systems initiative [earthobservations.org], the International Society for Digital Earth [www.digitalearth-isde.org], etc.) and the major private-sector developments aimed at organizing world information geographically. These have made it possible for citizens to contribute and share geographic information easily and interact with each other in what is labeled as Web 2.0. Overall, the emerging view was that there is a need to bring together these seemingly parallel worlds: top-down official information and bottom-up citizen-provided information. On this basis, we articulated a revised vision of Digital Earth to help guide our effort. This vision recognizes the need to integrate scientific and public- and private-sector data to help us understand the complex interactions between natural, man-made, and social environments over time and across space—a framework to help us realize what has changed or is likely to happen, when, and why. To support this vision, we also identified key research topics on which to focus our energies, including improved methods for the spatiotemporal modeling of heterogeneous and dynamic data (citizen provided, sensors, official), the visualization of abstract concepts in space (e.g., risk, vulnerability, perceived quality of life), and ways to assess and model reliability and trust in information coming from many different sources (for more details, see ijsdir.jrc.ec.europa. eu/index.php/ijsdir/article/view/119/99). You could argue that with all the work we still have to do to develop and implement INSPIRE in Europe, we can ill afford to look for new organizational and technical challenges and research topics. Yet we should never lose sight of why we are building these infrastructures and investing significant public resources to do so. They are not ends in themselves but a means to improve our understanding and stewardship of the environment and develop our knowledge-based society. Without a clear view of where we want to go and what is needed to get there, we will not be able to guide the process effectively and address the grand challenges of today and tomorrow. The NextGeneration Digital Earth paper provides an initial contribution in shaping the longer-term view, and we welcome your feedback and contributions on inspire-forum.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pg/groups/98/ next-generation-digital-earth. About the Author Max Craglia works in the Spatial Data Infrastructures Unit of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. This unit is responsible for the technical coordination of INSPIRE, working closely with other Commission colleagues in the Directorate General for the Environment and EUROSTAT. Craglia edits the International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research (ijsdir.jrc.ec.europa. eu) and is one of the founders of the Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science (www.vespucci.org). More Information For more information, contact Max Craglia, senior scientist, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (e-mail: massimo.craglia@jrc. ec.europa.eu). AN GIS software and usable by few trained geospatial professionals into geoprocessing services that can operate in established workflows over the datasets available on the Web and provide answers to questions posed by the many who are not experts. The research issues here are many and include eliciting and formalizing processes and models from experts; turning them into geoprocesses, which can be understood and used across disciplines (including explanation of the theoretical underpinning of models so that they can be used appropriately); and selecting the appropriate service to go with the appropriate data to contribute to addressing a question in ways that are methodologically robust. Some of these challenges were addressed, for example, by the ORCHESTRA project (www.eu-orchestra.org/overview. shtml), but in that instance, all the geoservices had to be chained manually, which would not scale up in a global setting with thousands of datasets and services available. So we need automatic or semiautomatic means of making the right choices and links. To add spice to these challenges, there are also always new ideas and technologies to understand and harness. So as we were settling in to implement service-oriented architectures (SOA) for SDIs with the corollary of ISO metadata, OGC discovery services, etc. (i.e., following the paradigm of the library that separates the resources from their metadata), along came Linked Data (linkeddata. org) with Resource Description Framework (RDF) to provide semantically rich descriptions of resources and their linkages. Of course, Linked Data and SOA are not necessarily at odds. However, this is a good example of the way one needs to build the infrastructure for today with a view to where we should be going tomorrow. Toward the Next-Generation Digital Earth To help sharpen our vision of the future, the Vespucci Initiative brought together in 2008 a